SEO – TRUTH, MYTH, and LIES – PART 9

If you have been reading ANY of our blog posts, you will realize we are passionate about Semantics and proper coding techniques when creating websites. Besides being the professional thing to do, we believe it carry’s a HUGE impact on SEO.

How does site speed effect SEO? Amazon stated in their internal testing that for every 100 milliseconds of load time, that sales decreased by 1 percent. The average user expects a load time of 2 seconds, and after three seconds site visitors leave.

SEO is measured not just by your site showing up on a search results page, but the ability for visitors to navigate from page to page on your website in a concise and logical manner, and a timely manner. The biggest culprit of slow sites are sites that are not semantically correct, which means sites are using outdated, bloated, and mal-formed code.

What is the cause of bad code? We believe it is primarily from two sources, one from so called “web developers” that have to use automated software to create websites, and second from most of the “free templates” you see floating around on the internet. If your web company, or web person can’t dig in and write code from scratch, they are not professionals, and chances are even though you may have a “decent” looking website, it will not perform up to standards.

The Truth

Speed Matters – plain and simple. We live in a world of instant gratification, and if visitors have to wait for content to load, they will leave and find another site.

The Myth

We can save you money by using a free or low cost WordPress template. This is probably the single worst thing you can do in regards to your websites performance and SEO performance ratings. We won’t say that ALL of the WordPress templates floating around on the exchange websites are not up to standards, but we feel comfortable stating that over 90% of them would fail validation checks, which ultimately effects your bottom line.

Remember the old rule – you get what you pay for.

The Lie

Why would I pay for someone to develop my website, I can go and use a free service online to do it myself. Well this isn’t a lie, you can, but it will not perform well, it will not SEO well, and ultimately if you rely on that website for your marketing needs it will not succeed.

The websites from the free or low cost create your own website templates have value, but they are best suited for a personal blog, or for a sports legue, or some other purpose beisdes business.

The following video covers a few items from Google’s Matt Cutts, in regards to SEO. This video touches a bit on site speed, and then a few other topics.