One of the factors that influences website ranking and bounce rate (visitors coming to your website and leaving without visiting another page) is the website loading speed. Fortunately for website owners Google has introduced an online page speed tool to measure speed and suggest ways to improve.

Do you find it annoying when you click on a website and it takes a while to load? Do you lose patience and go and see if you can find what you want on another website? Google’s market analysis identified this a while ago and incorporated it into their algorithm – this basically means that if a website takes a long time to load it will have a detrimental effect on their rankings.

The ramifications of this to your website are obvious and can be hugely influential in how you rank and therefore in how effective your website is at generating leads and sales. A professional SEO company will always keep an eye on your website’s loading speed as part of their ongoing optimisation work (usually through Webmaster Tools), however, if you have not instructed an SEO company to look at your website, there is a now an easy to access and use page speed tool available from Google Labs: http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com

This page speed tool will analyse the page you enter into it and give you back a page speed score out of 100 (with the higher number the better). It will then provide you with an analysis that will give you high, medium and low priority suggestions to improve your websites performance.