Increase speed - increase Rank of your website

Speed of the website is now used as factor in determining its search rank (according to Google). So in-order to increase the rank of the website we should also keep in mind that even if the website has strong SEO it should also be very fast so that it does not hamper the SEO.

In this article I will not write anything about SEO but yes I will surely tell you the techniques to increase the speed of the website by using some tools which are available.

Page Speed and YSlow plug-ins are available for firebug. These plug-ins can be used as a basis for determining the cause behind the website being very slow. Key things are as follows:

    1. CDN (Content Delivery Network) to store website files such as css, images etc.
    2. CSS size reduction.
    3. Caching the page data both on server and on the visitor's browser.
    4. Optimising database tables and queries.

Tools: Page Speed and YSlow

Page Speed is a tool made available by Google and YSlow is a FireFox Add-on made available by Yahoo.   Both the tools work on the same measure by they have a slight difference.

Page Speed: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html

YSlow: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=yslow

There is good article bout CDN here: http://omaralzabir.com/make_your_website_faster_using_content_delivery_network/

Here is article by Yahoo which will tell you all the prospects of the increasing the speed of the website:   http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

According to Google :

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

However, note that the article also states:
So page-load speed, in and of itself is rarely a key factor in SEO.

Tips To Speed up Your Website:
The following web page provides many useful tips and hints on cutting down the size of your web pages to decrease the load time:

    Speed Up Web Site Load Time
    http://www.webweaver.nu/html-tips/load-time.shtml

In general, trim down the fat.  Get rid of unnneded bytes.  Avoid overly using images.  Use external scripts so that the browser's local cache can be effective.  There is much more there, too!

I hope once reading this article, you all will get the idea about how to increase the speed of the website and how to increase the page rank by this.

Thanks
Parag