Testing Your Page Speed Important?
You all probably know by now that page speed is an important ranking factor for determining your position on search engine rankings. While this is true, I am of the opinion that more important than this is to provide your readers with the best possible user experience and having your website load quickly not only achieves that but also avoids from "casual" visitor to quickly abandon your site if it takes too much time to load. When this happens, you loose potential readers (or customers) and that is something you don't want to happen.Optimize Page Speed
To optimize your page speed, you first will want to know how long your pages load and detect if any, which components are taking too much to fully render. Having the right SEO tools for this is essential as the results will provide you with some insights of what to tackle. One the most obvious tools available for performing this test is Google's Webmaster Tools. Although Google Webmaster Tools (under the Labs Tab) does this, it provides you with "average" data and basically directs you to use another tool, which is not the object of this post today.Pingdom Page Speed Test And Other Useful Webmaster Tools
Pingdom is relatively a new online webmaster tool that among other things provide you with "on the fly" results. Here are some things you can do with this free tool.How The Page Speed Test Works?
As stated by Pingdom
The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser. The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars.
You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to in for example a CSS file.
Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.
Note: This version doesn't load objects included in JavaScripts. We have also put a limit on the number and size of the objects that are loaded (to prevent the tool from downloading movies, for example).
Check Your DNS Health
Correct DNS settings are vital for a website to work properly. The DNS Health test in Pingdom Tools will help you find errors in your DNS settings, and verify that your domain name has been set up correctly.The test will automatically find out which DNS servers are used by the domain name you specify, then perform a number of tests on them to make sure that the domain name is properly set up and that those DNS servers are responding in a consistent and correct manner.
There you go. Now you have the tools to measure your sites performance and once you know which components are causing your page to load slowly, you are now able to rectify problems and increase you page speed to optimize SEO and user experience. This action, combined with Google's SEO Tips, will most definitely put you in front of those who don't. After that, all you have to do is constantly monitor SEO progress, to verify how your efforts are performing.
