Speaker 1 0:01

Hello and welcome to . Seo is not that hard . I'm your host , ed Dawson , the founder of KeywordsPeopleUsecom , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . In today's episode , I'm going to cover tip number one from my list of quick SEO tips . What are my quick SEO tips ? These are short bits of SEO wisdom that crop up regularly when I speak with people on the subject of SEO . We also show them on KeywordsPeopleUsecom when our tools are working on searches to show people while they're waiting for results . Just head to KeywordsPeopleUsecom and do a people also ask search and you'll see what I mean . So what is tip number one ? Well , here it is . Tip one make your website as fast as possible .

Speaker 1 0:42

Google hates sites that load slowly . So what do I mean by this ? Well , google wants to give users not just the right answers , but also a really good experience , and one of the key things that Google knows and this is borne out by lots of research into user behaviour is that people have got a really , really short tolerance for sites and pages that load slowly . So it's really key to make sure that your pages on your site load as fast as possible . Now , what is fast ? Think about it as yourself when you're using the web . How long are you willing to wait for a page to load ? I bet it's literally probably only a second or so . Nowadays , we're so used to pages loading incredibly quickly , almost in the flash of an eye so you've really got to get your pages that fast as you can . So how important is speed as a ranking signal ? Well , google confirmed back in 2010 that they use site speed as a confirmed signal when calculating rankings . Now , it's not the most important , it's a minor signal , but it's one of those ones that actually it's just a good practice to do . Not only will it help improve your search rankings , it will also help improve user's experience on site . So users are going to spend more time on your site . They're more likely to engage your content and they're more likely to convert . If you're trying to sell something or get them to take an action , they're more likely to do that . If there's a site that's responsive . Just think of yourself . I've mentioned it before . You get fed up with sites that are too slow , you will leave them . So this is why it's really , really important to concentrate on site speed as a real foundation for your site .

Speaker 1 2:27

Okay , so we know that site speed is a core issue . So obviously we need to be able to measure this and fortunately there's a number of tools out there that let you quantify how well your site is performing when it comes to page speed . I'll put notes for the links for these into the , but we'll just go through a few now and then . There's a great for going to try them with your sites and seeing how they perform , just to give you a benchmark , so you know if you've got an issue that needs to look out on it . The first one we'll look at is page speed insights from Google . You can find this via any web page by going to pagespeedwebdev and in there you can put in any web page and click the analyse button and it will then run through your page . It will do some calculations , look at the performance and then give you a whole number of diagnostic points and also , handily , it gives you a nice little overall performance score , which is a great metric to look at in the first instance just to see how well you're doing . And this performance score is kind of calibrated against other sites online , so you can see how you're performing against others , and this is like a simple 0-100 score and they say 0-49 is a site with problems . 50 to 89 is a site that needs improvement and 90 to 100 is just kind of a good benchmark way . You know you're one of the top performing sites . If you get within that , you can also select to choose between a mobile or a desktop view , because obviously sites can perform differently on desktop versus mobile .

Speaker 1 4:05

The second tool I'd suggest is the Pingdom website speed test . So if you go to toolspingdomcom and in there you'll see easily at the top , just put in your URL you want to check and then you choose where you want to test from . They offer a number of locations around the world . So just pick the one that's closest to where most of your users are likely to be and click Start Test and this will go out , again similar to the Google test . It will go out , it will get your site , it will tell you how long it takes to download and it will give you a score grade . And again , this is they do from 0 to 100 , but they grade it like A , b , c , d , e , f if you're doing really badly . But again , it's a really good instant idea of how well you're doing . So if you were getting A's and B's , maybe the odd C , you're doing quite well but really want it as high as possible .

Speaker 1 4:58

So if you're getting anything that's in the reds , like E's , f's , that kind of thing , this is where you know you've got a problem and you need to sort it out . So hopefully you've done some tests and found that your site is fine . You don't need to do anything . But just in case you're unlucky and there is an issue with your site and there's something you need to do to speed it up , then what are some tips that we can look at to improve this ? Well , we'll go through a few . Some of these are simple that anyone can do . Some you might need to get . If you're not technically yourself , you might need to get a developer involved . But we'll start with some simple ones and then work away on .

Speaker 1 5:35

So the first thing you can look at is compressing your images . One of the biggest problems with slow sites is if your images are just too big . So if we can decrease the file size , we commit them , load faster and therefore increase your page speed . Now , it's that simple to do . You just need to use . There's loads of free imagery sizes out there . The one I would recommend is PicCurySize , which is at piccurysizecom , and you can just go there , put your image in and follow the steps and they will compress it and reduce the file size , meaning it'll load faster for you . Now , with images , always choose the right image format . You want to use JPEGs for real world images , such as photographs , and then for other image types things like logos and that kind of image you want to use a PNG If possible . Try and avoid using a GIF , or GIF as people say , because they are likely to slow down your page . If you need to do something animated , we would say try putting in a video rather than using a GIF file .

Speaker 1 6:42

So the second tip is to enable browser caching . Now , browser caching is where you instruct the users web browser to cache files , which is to make a local copy of those files once it's downloaded them once . This means that when it loads subsequent pages , it doesn't necessarily have to reload every single file , because across the site you'll find there's many files , such as logos , javascript files , css files that are common across an entire site . So if you say to a browser don't pick these up every single time , that means that subsequent pages are going to load faster . This only works for people who use the site multiple times the first time they use it . See , browser caching's not going to make any difference to the page load speed , but it will , community of the time , mean that regular users find the site works faster and faster for them . Now , if you're using WordPress , there's a number of plugins that can do this , like WP Rocket or WP so W3 Total Cache . If you're not on WordPress , then this is something that you can do in yourhchaccess file . If you don't know what that is , then the easiest thing to do is speak with developer whoever set the site up for you , and ask them to look at enabled browser caching for you .

Speaker 1 7:56

So tip three for speeding your site up is to use a content delivery network , or a CDN for short . Now , this works on the theory that wherever your web server is , the further away someone may request to it is actually the slow it will get . Now , if someone's in the same country as your server , then this isn't going to make a lot of difference . But , for example , say your web server is in the UK and the person requesting pages on the site in Australia . That physical distance actually does slow down the response time , so it takes longer for requests to be made and received from the user to the website , and this can cumulatively add up and mean that your site appears slower to someone who's further away , and obviously they're then going to have not such a good experience with the site . So what a content delivery network does is it makes local copies of your website , so it caches pages from your website and puts them on distributed service around the world , so that when someone in Australia makes a request to your site , they're actually going to request it from a server that's much more local to them hopefully in the same country and so therefore , this will reduce the time between requests and responses , meaning that the site performs much better for them and they get a much better experience . Some common CDNs are Cloudflare or Jetpack or Amazon Cloudfront if you're using Amazon web services . We'll put some links to different CDNs in the show notes and we'll also do another complete show on CDNs in the future .

Speaker 1 9:35

Okay , so the final tip I'm going to give today for being able to improve page speed load times is to look at minifying your JavaScript , css and HTML files . Now , what is minification ? Well , if you ever look at those files that make up your website , you'll find the other written code , and they're written to be human readable in most cases . So there's lots of spaces in there , tabs and white space , which actually increase the file sizes by a significant percentage . So minification is simply removing all that formatting , all that white space so that it really compacts the files down just to what's important for your browser to work with . So the browser doesn't care whether it's well-formatted for a human to read , it just cares that the code works , makes sense and it can interpret it . So you can use a tool like go to websites such as minifierorg where you can put in the files your JavaScript , css files or whatever into that tool and it will remove all that white space and reduce the file size . So over time it will make a difference to the load times , response times when browsers are downloading files . Yeah , it's also if you're using WordPress , there is WP Rocket will also perform minification for you and to again reduce those file sizes , make them more efficient and load faster for the browser and therefore decrease the load time of your pages . So that covers tip number one make your website as fast as possible . We've covered the reasons why speed is so important . You know how to check the speed performance through website and you've got some tips on how to improve your page speeds , if you need to .

Speaker 1 11:21

Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe , share . It really helps . Seo is not that hard . It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . See why thousands of people use this every day . Try it today free at keywordspeopleusecom . If you want to get in touch or have any questions , I'd love to hear from you . I'm at channel five on Twitter or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO . It's not that hard .