Search engine optimization (SEO) is the profession of enhancing a webpage, so it works better in search results. Unfortunately, there is no one single way to do this. Even if there were some loophole in the system that was susceptible to some black hat SEO methods, the benefits to your website would only last as long as the loophole was left uncovered. After that, your site would be penalized and suffer dismal search engine rankings until the blemish was corrected.
Instead, there are numerous little tactics that can all help your sites’ search rankings. From technical improvements to content creation to search engine marketing, each of these move your site slowly towards the end goal of being prominent online.
One of the things that technical SEO improves is your website’s upload speed, which not only makes it rank better in search, but also directly improves the experiences of your site’s visitors.
The Importance of Speed
A website that uploads quickly has two benefits: It improves your search ranking, and it improves your site users’ experience.
Search Ranking
One of the things that search engines pay attention to when determining which sites are important and relevant for a given search query is how quickly a website uploads. Slow pages lose ranking to pages that upload quickly. Google and its ilk are interested in burying slower pages in its search engine results pages because they want their users to like the search results they get for their query. One of the least satisfying webpages to click on, though, is the one that takes forever to load.
User Experience
Which brings us to your site users’ experience: They like fast webpages. The age of dial-up is over – you can no longer click on a website and then walk to the water cooler and back before it comes up. Pages that take more than a couple of seconds to load completely are considered slow, and internet users will avoid them like the plague. Even a small improvement to a site’s upload speed has been shown to improve its conversion rates.
In this sense, your interests are exactly aligned with search engines in making your site upload quickly.
Technical SEO Deals With Speed
Numerous aspects of technical SEO deal with the speed of your webpage. Unfortunately, technical SEO moves often sound like something that you need a computer engineer to do. It’s imposingly heavy with jargon like HTTP requests (a web browser asking a server for a file to upload a webpage) and CMS (Content Management System – an example is WordPress). However, there are simple technical SEO maneuvers that you can do quickly and easily on your own that will help speed up your webpage to help its search rankings, including:
- Optimizing the images on your law firm’s website, and
- Flattening your website architecture.