Trim Down Your Web Pages – Get Higher Rankings

The way in which Google and other search engines rank relevant websites on their results pages has changed many times since the beginning of the internet as we now know it today and Google says that further changes will be forthcoming.

Search Engine Watch's Eric Enge writes that various new factors will be taken into account when determining a page's rank in relevant Google search results. For the first time SEO professionals will now be able to use a page's minimal load time as a way to boost it further up Google's search ranks. Google engineer Matt Cutts discussed this factor at a conference in November and indicated that there is a strong movement within Google to make page load time a ranking factor because pages that load quickly improve the user experience.

Cutts indicated that Google could start using load speed as a ranking factor within the next year.

Additionally, writes Enge, Google Local Search will take non-link web references into account, and social media results will be factored in as a way to measure "freshness." A Web reference is a mention of a business that isn't implemented as a link and count as votes in a similar way that links are used currently.

Search engine optimisation experts agree that the impact of these changes, while still partially unclear, will be critically important to the practice of effective SEO.