Matt Cutts, who is Google’s Software Engineer, continually speaks to the media and web professionals regarding search engine optimisation. He has told several news agencies that speed is imperative to rank high. In fact in 2010 your site’s page rank could be detrimentally affected if you do not increase the speed on your site. So what can affect the speed of your site?

The most obvious answer is web hosting. Web hosting sites that have shared servers will not only decrease your speed, but your uptime. By upgrading your server you can help speed up your site. Furthermore you can look at the images you have on your site. Are you using JPEG for photos and PNG for Graphics? If not, you definitely want to switch this around so that you have the right file sizes. The file size will directly affect the speed of the downloading page. The more images and graphics the slower a site tends to be. You can use these formats without compromising your quality on the site.

It may seem like a game you are playing, but it is imperative to your business to make sure you have everything as the search engines desire it to be truly successful.