I think at this point, it is fair to say that Google aims to improve a user’s web experience – in other words, when a user uses Google to browse the web, and Google links to sites, Google wants those sites to be high quality. Informative, transparent, adding value to the web, and also easy to use. Now this is my interpretation of Google’s actions, not some official Google statement.
In any case, one can argue that site speed is part of a quality web experience. Matt Cutts mentions now, that site speed will be used as a factor in Google rankings.
So now that its done, you obviously want to consider it. In any case, you wanted to consider site speed before this SEO change as well; painfully slow pages won’t get you more sales and people are going to click away.
How can you find out how slow your pages are? Two tools use for Firefox are the Page Speed from Google, and YSlow from Yahoo. If you are a technician, you can use these to find out which page of your site is slow.
I’ve used YSlow, but after a few minutes, you may realize that unless you are developing your site management system or coded the site yourself, this isn’t something that you will want to mess with.
A lot of IMers use wordpress, and we’re fortunate to have such an active community providing top plugins and functionality. Page speed optimizations are no exception. Tutorial9 has compiled a superb list of caching plugins for wordpress – these caching plugins will help you improve your wordpress blog speed. The recommendation from the article is the W3 Total Cache plugin – take that one for a test drive if your Wordpress site is slow.
Another quick tip – if you are going to have hundreds or thousands of wordpress posts or categories, the best permalink structure may be something like:
/%post_id%/%postname%/
as you set the SEO benefits of the keywords in the URL, and you get a unique ID that will improve post lookup. You can see: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Structure_Tags for details. Another site benefit is that if you want your site to be syndicated by Google News, they would also require a unique ID in the URL.
