As we all know Google search results are based on many different parameters – starting with most important ones like content or inlinks and ending up with factors like accessibility. The one who will figure it all out and implement on the website will probably become very reach. It’s ‘just’ a matter of fitting Google taste perfectly.

Recently Google announced that there is another element which all webmasters should take into account while thinking on Google search results: SITE SPEED.

Site speed shows us how quickly a website responds to web request.

It’s obvious that speeding up the website is important for both visitors and site owners. Users spend more time on the sites which loads faster. Of course it won’t fix the content or user experience problems, but definitely it matters. And this is why Google has been starting to affect search queries by the site speed.

There have already been some tools on the market which can evaluate the speed of the site:

- Page Speed – Firefox add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives improvement suggestions

- Webmaster Tools – inside Labs > Site Performance webmasters can check site speed and see the results in the chart

- YSlow – a free tool from Yahoo! with optimization suggestions

More tools can be found here:

Speed Tools

Site speed is not and will probably not be the key parameter for search ranking algorithms, but for sure it is worth mentioning element when it’s about SEO, and all webmasters should think about it while creating websites.