It has been more than 7 days since Google confirmed the influence of site speed in web search ranking. Site speed is a signal that Big G is considering with many others and it may not be a strong ranking factor as of now. But the ball has started rolling – if the webmasters do not review site speed now and take suitable steps to make them load faster, it may be too late!

Here are some free tools (suggested by Google) that can be used to test and improve site speed:

• PageSpeed: Open source Firefox/Firebug add on
• YSlow: A free tool by Yahoo!
• WebPagetest: Page performance and optimization checklist

Besides, the Site Performance check in Google Webmaster console helps to find out the areas that can be improved. Many other tools and information on how to make your website faster are available at http://code.google.com/speed

The comments below the announcement show a mixed opinion about the change. Some are happy as the speed gets importance, whereas, some are concerned about the websites that contain images, videos and flash files. People have also asked how Google will take care of the sites that are slow because of the Google Analytics code snippet!

There is no reason to think that Google will not improve the algo. Let’s wait for the Speed Part II to be released!

Continuous effort to offer better user experience is what makes Google different from others. And that is the reason, Google is putting so much stress on website loading time. How much time your website takes to load is a factor Google is likely to consider to rank your website!

Just think: a user runs a Google search, Google displays the results, and then when the user clicks on a link, it takes several minutes to load the page! Why should Google list such a web page that annoys its user? Logical!

Slow websites are bad for your users also. When someone with dial up connection visits your website and the page takes so much time to load, chances are high that the user will leave your website. So, you are losing visitors because your website is slow.

Google is so desperate to enhance user experience that they are going to introduce a new internet protocol, name spdy (should be pronounced as speedy) which is supposed to be many times faster than http. It’s own optical fiber based private internet is in beta or something. What else do you need? Get ready to type spdy://www.google.com/ in near future.

Are you one of those who believe that Social Media cannot return satisfactory profit and that investing in Social Media is a total waste of money? Then this post is for you!

You simply cannot ignore social media anymore; if you do then you are going to lose something for sure. Google has integrated real time search with its web search. Logged in users can see relevant updates from their social networks.

In a video Google has described that this integration will help people find ‘What’s happening right now?’ and ‘What’s happening nearby?’ very easily. Watch the video here.

Now comes the SEO point of view: isn’t it an easy way to make it to the first page of the search engines? If your website is new chances are high that it will take some time to rank high for relevant searches; but if you have an active network, you can actually appear on the first page throughout the day. For this you have be a super-active node on various social media platforms preferably on those Google is fetching data from.

Even if someone is not getting quality traffic from social media, they can get a strong web presence by staying active on social media and networking websites. Now, how to get quality traffic from social media is a different topic; will discuss more on it later. Keep visiting us.

With Google Analytics coming loaded with a bunch of more advanced features it is thought that Google Page Rank Checker will lose its importance to Internet marketers. More powerful, flexible and intelligent, the new Google Analytics enterprise-class makes internet marketing more enjoyable. How? Here is an excerpt.

Google Analytics now lets you set two new Goal types – Time on Site and Pages per Visit. This feature, according to Google, will help you measure “user engagement and branding success on your site”.

Today when mobile phone meets the web with the implement of modern technology, Google had to think about increasing number of mobile users accessing Internet via mobile phones. This is the reason why Google Analytics has introduced Expanded Mobile Reporting. Now capable of tracking traffic to your mobile website Google Analytics can also track visits to your regular website from any high-end web-enabled phones.

One prominent data analysis feature of new Google Analytics is Advanced Table Filtering, which makes sorting and filtering of data easier and more accurate.

Use of multiple Custom Variables adds more flexibility to Google Analytics. It gives Internet marketers the power to personalize Google Analytics for tracking their website visitors.

Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates has gone one step further. Now you can share them with the profiles of your choice.

And finally, what makes Google Analytics more Intelligent than ever before is Custom Alerts. Google Analytics is now powered with an Intelligence Engine based on more efficient algorithms to automatically track and notify unusual changes in the data pattern of the website to its owner. However, users can set the alert attributes manually as well.