SEO Tips– Increasing Page Load Speed

Attract More Readers- Speed Up Your Blog

Internet users are not patient. They will not wait around while your blog or site loads. In 2006, Akamai and Jupiter Research identified '4 Seconds' as the maximum length of  time web shoppers would wait for a page to load. The following tips can help you have more readers stay on your blog or website and reduce the number of page “bounces” showing in your statistics. Reducing page bounces can go a long way to increasing you search engine ranking.
Blog load speed is critical to attracting more readers to your blog. If your blog takes a long time to load, many readers may leave your blog before they have the chance to read it. Here are a few tips and tricks that will help your blog or site load faster and attract more users:

Posts

Go for Quality over Quantity

Keep your main page short sweet and to the point. Make it interesting so people will want to click links on the page to explore more pages inside your site, Be sure your call to action is prominent and easy to find,

Reduce Main Page Posts

Your blog's load time can be affected by the amount of information or number of posts you display on your main page. If using a Blogger blog, you can easily edit the number of posts displayed of the main page from the Settings | Formatting tab. Blogger recommends displaying 10 or fewer posts on the main page.

Create Teaser Posts Using Jump Breaks

Showing shortened cliff-hanger versions of each post on your home page using “jump breaks” can increase the amount of time a  visitor spends on your first page, by offering them a variety of posts in a faster blink.. Choose an interesting spot to place the “Read More” jump break, to entice the reader to click the link and read the rest of the article. In Blogger,creating a “Read More” jump break is as easy as 1,2,3- as shown in the diagram below:

Third Party JavaScript and Links

Google/Blogger widgets, are optimized to work with blogger and load faster with Blogger blogs.. However, if you need to use third party JavaScript and links, try putting JavaScript at the bottom of your blog to speed up load time. Similarly, put any 3rd party sidebar JavaScript widgets at the bottom of the sidebar. If you are using Google Adsense, text ads load fastest.

Images and Media

Text loads fastest. The more images, videos and other multi-media you have on your blog the longer it takes to load. However, images and other multimedia are important to attracting users to your blog, so optimize the load speed of your images and media. Here are a few tips to increase the load speed of your media:

• Decrease the size of your images or use thumbnails that link to the full-size image.
  
• If you use third party images, consider uploading them to Picasa Web Albums via the Blogger post editor. (This is a snap with Windows Live Writer as well)
  
• Have a large number of images to display? Upload all your images (from a vacation or event) to a Picasa Web Album and link to the album in your post or sidebar.
  
• Use <alt> tags on all your images, so people can anticipate what will be in that blank space, while waiting for your photos.

Other suggestions

• If you've added any custom CSS to your blog, make sure you put it at the top of the page.
  
• The most important content of your blog that catches readers attention should load the quickest. To help you identify which items are taking the longest to load use Stopwatch. To use Stopwatch, enter your blog's URL into the text box and click "Start StopWatch". Stopwatch will then open your blog in a frame and will record the time it takes for everything on your blog to load, including images, videos, widgets, etc. Take note of the items that take the longest to load and modify them appropriately using the suggestions.

Resources: (accessed March 13,2011)
Press release of time study
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