This document discusses how website speed affects search engine optimization. Slow website speed negatively impacts the user experience and can hurt SEO rankings. Factors that influence website speed include hosting, shared hosting environments, hosting hardware specifications, website code, themes, and plugins. The document provides tips to evaluate website speed such as using tools to test speed and get feedback from users. Optimizing for speed involves modifying code, compressing images, using a content delivery network, or changing themes.

1. SOCIAL MEDIA
MARKETING
SEO
Search Engine Optimization encompasses a wide variety of
techniques in which your website can be better tracked and
displayed by Google (the largest search engine). Through
comprehensive management your site can have the largest
chance of succeeding.
(888) 870-3181
/VASEOExpert
www.virginiaseo.org
info@virginiaseo.org
CONTENT
GENERATION
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With the recent Google algorithm changes,
content generation, publishing, and blogging
are the keys to ranking a site and driving
traffic. Through careful management, your
business can reap the benefits of constant
content.
Social Media Marketing is an important part of any business,
large or small. As social media develops, businesses are finding
new and innovative ways in which to sell products and attract
customers. Can you afford to ignore a possible revenue stream?
VIRGINIA SEO

2. Your Website In The Fast Lane: Speedy SEO (Part
1)
virginiaseo.org /blog/your-website-in-the-f ast-lane-speed-and-seo-part-1/
Adys Lynn Dill
This is the f irst part in a series on SEO and speed! You can see the second part here:
https://www.virginiaseo.org/blog/your-website-in-the-f ast-lane-speed-and-seo-part-2
Tobias Noyes of colonialdrivingschool.com was recently contacted by a visitor to his website. The
visitor sent him a message along the lines of , “I recently arrived on your website and I noticed that
it was a little bit sluggish and slow.” I have experienced the same things with my own blog and here
are some tips I took to speed things up. He outlined a link that linked back to his blog and
contained some inf ormation regarding speeding up a WordPress site. This is a really thoughtf ul
and helpf ul thing f or a random visitor to do, even if there were hidden motives (af f iliate
marketing).
Speeeeeeeed
So let’s discuss website speed and how it af f ects your search engine optimization. Your website
speed af f ects two dif f erent areas of your search engine optimization, f irst it af f ects the user
experience and is probably the biggest item on this list. When users arrive at your site, does it
take your page a while to load? Are the pages and images loading seconds af ter the page itself
loads? Does your page f lash up on styled bef ore the CSS stylesheets load up? What about your
slider pager, are they slowing the other things down on your website?
The User Experience
All of these things af f ect the user experience
negatively- which is bad! Designing f or the user
experience is your top priority not only as a
designer but also as a search engine
optimization savvy user. There are some really
great ways to test the speed of your website
and one of the f irst and best ways is to…
Browse the website. Send an email to your
f riends and have them go and look over the
website. Ask your visitors through comments,
blog posts or f orums what they think about the
speed of your website. Take all that f eedback and compile it together and get an overall picture of
how your users actually f eel about your website. I was under the impression when I launch my
website that it was f ast until our user spoke up and told me that it was slow. This led me to
investigate deeper and I realize that what I considered f ast and what my users considered f ast
are not necessarily the same thing. Now that you have your baseline, depending on whether your
website is f ast or not, there are a whole bunch of things that you can do to speed things up.
These include things like modif ying the code, compressing images, using a content delivery
network, or modif ying your theme. As a warning, some of these items may be pretty technical in
nature, and not something average web user or small business owner will be able to do. All of
these items should be something that your web designer can do, so if it f eels too technical f or
you, just send a quick email to your web designer and ask them to take care of it. There are

3. several categories that break the speed of your website:
Hosting
Hosting is a very broad subject. Hosting is the actual Web server that’s running your website.
There is a wide variety of dif f erent hosting companies out there, and pretty much every website
you see is going to be built of f of a dif f erent one. I could sit here all day and argue f or one host
or another, but you are going to go with the host that you want or what your web designer told
you to go with. I recommend BlueHost, and I do not recommend GoDaddy, to be honest. Your
hosting provider has many dif f erent plans which you can purchase to host your website. These
plans vary such as an economy shared plan all the way to a dedicated server. You can pay
according to the amount of hardware you want running your website. When you go f or the budget
host such as GoDaddy, you are getting a poor hosting package. This hosting package has a
direct ef f ect on the speed of your website. My website Virginia SOL was running on a deluxe plan
at GoDaddy when I decided to switch over to a virtual private server on BlueHost. The speed
increase was visually apparent and by the numbers it almost tripled in speed.
Threes a Crowd
Your hosting provider controls how many websites are shared with your website on your Web
server. Dedicated servers do not have any other hosts on them and they also tend to be much
more expensive. For a typical hosting plan like GoDaddy, there can be many websites alongside
your own site on a Web server; this can lead to a slowdown due to the sharing of resources.
There is a tool available to check what websites share your server:
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/ . If you use this tool and run
colonialdrivingschool.com, you will see that this site is shared on a GoDaddy server with over
1,000 other websites. If you run the same tool on VirginiaSEO.org, you’ll see that my site is on a
server with nine other websites. This means that I’m f ighting nine other websites f or my
resources even though I have dedicated resources in my VPS. This would lead you to believe that
colonialdrivingschool.com is going to perf orm slower due to the sharing of resources by the
hosting provider.
Hosting Hardware
There are a couple of other f actors that af f ect
your hosting and most of these boil down to
the hardware that’s packed behind your hosting.
Most hosting plans have an administrative
dashboard, and if you log in, you can see what
sort of statistics your Web server is getting. If
you look at GoDaddy’s shared plan, you might
see things like 512 Mb or RAM, or 500 Gb
bandwidth. These are all f actors that af f ect the
speed of your website and the lower
means slower. If you look at a virtual private
server like mine, you might see specs like two
gigs of RAM 5 Tb of bandwidth. Your hosting
provider might also use various types of hard drives. Some of these now of f ers solid-state
drives, which perf orm f aster. The location of your hosting provider also makes a dif f erence on its
speed. If you’re hosting providers in China and you are accessing your website f rom America,
things are going to be a little bit slower because every communication has to travel half way
around the world. Another big item which controls the speed your website is the network cards
your server has. Hosting providers of f er mega bit cards as def ault. This means that the speed of

4. data going into and out of your website is limited to 100 Mb per second. Most hosting providers
are now of f ering gigabit cards. This is 10 times the pipe to transmit data into and out of your
website. You can most likely get this with your current hosting provider, though they tend to be a
little bit pricey.
Code
Now here comes the big one. The code of your website can greatly af f ect the speed of your
website. If you have a well-designed slim coded website, it’s going to perf orm f ast. If you have a
really bulky, very graphic intensive, heavy on JavaScript website, it’s going to perf orm slowly. If
you use a content management system, it is going to add overhead to your website versus using
plain HTML. This means that if your website runs on WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!, then you are
using a content management system and this is af f ecting your site speed. Now, these content
management systems themselves do not greatly af f ect your site speed but what does af f ect
your site speed, in relationship to the systems, is the use of plug-ins and themes.
Themes
Themes tend to increase the code overhead of your website. When your theme designer
designed the website typically they will create several stylesheets and link to them using various
methods. These stylesheets load on every page and increase the overhead of your page. Also
every time an element is added to the page, it increases the overhead of the HTML. Furthermore
when JavaScript is used to create animations or dynamically query inf ormation- this also
increases overhead. So if your website is using this really, really awesome theme that looks great
and it scrolls sideways and has sliding images and a f lashy graphics, this is probably af f ecting
your websites speed. There are many tools to test the speed of your website and give you a very
nice report with actionable items that you can do to increase the speed of your website.
Remember to check out part 2: https://www.virginiaseo.org/blog/your-website-in-the-f ast-lane-
speed-and-seo-part-2
Adys Lynn Dill
SEO Consultant at Virginia SEO
Adys Lynn Dillis a mother of one and really enjoys spending time with her f amily.
Besides taking care of her husband (the other baby), she spends her time doing
graphic design as a part of the f amily business. The Dill Design is a local web design company in
Virginia, and they specialize in small business websites. Lynn also participates heavily with Virginia
SEO, and is head of social media marketing, and a key member of the content generation team.
Lynn enjoys social media so much that she is on it more than a normal person should be some
days.