How fast is your website? - SEO Part 1

How fast is your website? - SEO Part 1

Having a website is not enough. Having a site that loads pretty much faster should be considered more importantly depending on its purpose. An entertainment site or one that is meant to put up a good impression like a fashion or other presentation website may be allowed to load slowly due to the large size of the files that ought to be loaded before it fully shows up. Content like heavy action flash scripting, games, movie players and other digital image and files may naturally delay a page's load time. But what if it's an information based website or just a shopping website, time does
matter.

Putting Your Audience first
The location of your target audience should also be considered and if it is Nigeria, you should put into consideration, the fact that internet speed is generally slower than for developed countries. Even for Nigerians using much faster internet services like broadband, internet speed and connection are hardly reliable and so the web site owner needs to put all these into consideration when developing a site that ought to add meaning and benefit to the end users.
In Nigeria, having a website that loads much faster by having low file size should be considered essential as it could help improve user experience as well as improve the inflows from e-commerce. Even for bloggers, using a blogging template that is end user friendly by giving quick page loads can also be helpful to both sides. Nigerian bloggers seeking to make money online by monetizing their blogs should also consider the importance of having a faster loading website.

Variables within a webmaster's control
There are a couple of variables within a website owner's control through which he can be able to optimize his website and deliver a much faster loading website.

These includes:
- Selecting an efficient web hosting company
- Using quicker loading blog templates
- Minimizing the use of pictures
- Mobilizing your website
- Keeping texts at a minimum count

Selecting an efficient web hosting company
Your web hosting company may actually be slowing down your website or may be slowing down in delivering requests made for your web pages. There are many web hosting companies in Nigeria and you should not just choose anyone of them without considering their reliability. Some web hosts don't just have enough servers to attained to all their clients efficiently while some may actually shut down your website while everyone is asleep. Don't just buy into a web hosting package for the sake of it's price but also consider quality and delivery of prepaid service.

Using quicker loading blog templates
Different website owners use different web templates while Nigerian bloggers use mostly wordpress or blogger templates. Of course you are not limited to these but you should consider that internet speed is slow and selecting a simple template may be more beneficial to you and your users rather than selecting a template just because of its beauty. Beauty may cost you a lot of money for lost traffic. You may also personalize your existing blogging or website template, making it quicker, to suit the needs of the Nigerian online community.

Minimizing the use of pictures
You should consider minimizing the use of pictures on your website if you want it to load faster. Larger pictures tend to be more heavy and take more time to load. Also using a thumbnail and linking it to the main picture would also make your website load faster and increase your online earning potential. You may also try using only a single picture on a page or a blog topic.

Mobilizing your website
There has not being any better time than now to cash in on the Nigerian mobile world. The mobile web is much more visited by Nigerians than traditional full internet browsing. All these comes from the increasing use of mobile phones due to to escalating growth of the telecoms industry. The big 4 telecommunication companies (MTN, Zain, Glo, Etisalat) in Nigeria all offer GPRS and 3G internet service to their customers and people use it a lot for getting timely and needed information. For user such as that, having a full blown website may not be enough, getting your site mobilized could do you more good. If you have a domain already, you don't need to bother about rewriting a code for mobilizing your website, although some blogger templates automatically develop pages that a XHTML compliant and mobile friendly, getting a .mobi domain from Godaddy with the Instant mobilizer that comes with it can help your website get on the mobile web in a jiffy. The good thing I have learnt from this instant mobilizer also is that it keeps and updated mobile version of your main website and so it is not just a stagnant web mobilizer.

Keeping texts at a minimum count
Although search engines like websites that have a lot of text, even for a single page, this may cause your web page to load much slower and may even cause weariness to your visitors when reading through it. Keeping a minimum text count of say 500 words for each of your web page or blog posts is a good idea, especially for the Nigerian audience. This would help your website to load much faster than if it had an excitingly rich page but unending load time. So keeping your texts and hyperlinks on a particular page to a minimum is a good way to bring back repeat audience and maintain quick delivery. You could even break a 2000 word posts into 500 words on 4 pages each - This would still be search engine friendly.

Conclusion
This is a write-up on search engine optimization. I would be writing on a range of topics relating to this theme over a period of time. Thanks for reading. Got any comments, feel free to post them below.