As always I am keen to improve KSBKids’ ranking for children’s clothes.

In terms of SEO, Google is hinting at using Page Speed score in its ranking algorithm. Matt Cutt’s states: “If you have two sites that are equally relevant, same backlinks, everything else is the same, you’d probably prefer the one that’s a little bit faster, so page speed can in theory be an interesting idea to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But, absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. So, that’s not going to change.”

So although Google takes page speed into account (relevance still being the primary component) it is certainly a  crucial aspect in providing a pleasant user experience.  It ensures that a visitor’s ”limited” attention span and time are spent on content and not wasted waiting for images to load. Studies have shown that users will not tolerate more than a 4 second load time. If your site fails to offer a quick response, your users will leave.

Mark Bonnet from the B2B centre at Warwick Business Schoolhas pointed out to me that 2 of the major speed analysis tools are YSlow and Google’s Page Speed.

On this rather damp Sunday morning I came across GTmetrix, a free tool to help measure the speed of pages. It’s a handy, easy to use tool that provides a Page Speed Score using both Yslow and Google and it even highlights the factors that affect the speed. Have a look at it!

My problem now is carrying out their recommendations. I may well be a SEO Chick in the making, but programmer I am not!  I have learned of factors that may help to get KSBKids to rank better for children’s clothes. And the way I look at it, even if it does not achieve much with regard to ranking, if we can improve the user experience then that in itself is a great achievement!

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