If you keep up to date with the goings on in the SEO world you will have read about Google’s recent announcement regarding their inclusion of page load times in to their search ranking factors.  With a lot of companies jumping on the bandwagon to use this to sell their services I wanted to address what this means to your website and what you can do to make improvements.

The full announcement from Google can be found here is well worth a read http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html. In summary the key points to take home are:

• Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests
• While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page
• Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point

To see how your site is performing and to get a list of recommended changes I would start with looking at “Site Performance” within the Labs section of your Google Webmaster Tools.  As you can see one of my own websites is incredibly slow (thanks to multiple JS and CSS files plus a few resource heavy WordPress plug-ins) and needs dome serious attention!

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Over the years, there have been more and more companies selling domain names. When the internet was in its infancy, these companies were quite sparse; you really had to look around for a suitable company. Even if you were lucky enough to find a good seller for domains, the chances are that they would have charged the earth for almost all of the available domain names.

Fortunately, things have changed dramatically. It seems that every second company on the internet is trying to sell domain names, space or provide web hosting. The bad aspect of this is that you find that a lot of these companies try to undercut each other and therefore offer a poor service. They will happily sell you a domain name and then that’s often the end of it. They’ll offer no additional services and provide you with no extra help.

At I.T Studio Hosting we are a welcome break from this unfortunate trend. We do sell domain names but unlike other companies we offer a huge range of features to go with this. We provide free web forwarding to another web address; this is useful if you have free web space with another provider or you want to forward to the same domain but with a different domain extension, for example a .com to a .co.uk. We provide unlimited email forwarding to any email address you choose. There really are too many features to list here but you can be certain that no domain name seller will come close to what we offer.

What is the World Wide Web?

    * The Web is a network of computers all over the world.
    * All the computers in the Web can communicate with each other.
    * All the computers use a communication protocol called HTTP.

How does the  WWW work?

    * Web information is stored in documents called web pages.     * Web pages are files stored on computers called web servers.
    * Computers reading the web pages are called web clients.
    * Web clients view the pages with a program called a web browser.
    * Popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Firefox.

How does a Browser Fetch a Web Page?

    * A browser fetches a page from a web server by a request.
    * A request is a standard HTTP request containing a page address.
    * An address may look like this: http://www.example.com/default.htm.

How does a Browser Display a Web Page?

    * All web pages contain instructions for display.
    * The browser displays the page by reading these instructions.
    * The most common display instructions are called HTML tags.
    * HTML tags look like this <p>This is a paragraph.</p>.


What is a Web Server?

    * The collection of all your web pages is called your web site.
    * To let others view your web pages, you must publish your web site.
    * To publish your work, you must copy your site to a web server.
    * Your own PC can act as a web server if it is connected to a network.
    * Most common is to use an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

What is an Internet Service Provider?

    * ISP stands for Internet Service Provider.
    * An ISP provides Internet Services.
    * A common Internet service is web hosting.
    * Web hosting means storing your web site on a public server.
    * Web hosting normally includes email services.
    * Web hosting often includes domain name registration.