SEO Starts with Having a High-Quality Website

It’s never been more important to have a high quality website that is responsive, loads fast, and has great user experience. In the past, you could rank high in search engines with a poorly made site if you had tons of links pointing to it, but I think that is changing and some of the recent initiatives that Google is launching is proof of that.

Let’s take a look at a couple ways that Google is beginning to gauge how well made a website is, then I’ll take a peek in to the future to speculate on where we are heading.

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Measuring Site Speed with Google Analytics

Site speed has a huge impact on everything from user experience to search engine rankings. Google Analytics provides site speed reports so that you can monitor site speed over time. There are many other tools that will give you instant feedback on your site speed but I think Google Analytics is great because it allows you to see how the site loads for actual users. Let’s take a look at the site speed report.

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8 Performance Optimizations You Can Do in an Afternoon

In a perfect world, performance is something that everyone designs for from the very beginning of a project. But this post is not about that perfect world. This post is about what you can do if you only have an afternoon to devote to performance optimization. I’m going try to strike a balance between techniques that are helpful while being relatively easy to implement. I’ll also keep the explanations brief, because you have some optimizing to do, after all.

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Principles of Performance by Design

I wrote a post on Medium about how great performance starts with design. It was something that was running through my head for awhile; I thought Medium would be a great place to post it.

The post earned 4,500 views, 37 Medium recommendations, and 150 shares on Twitter (plus many more retweets). It also earned a spot on Web Performance Today’s list of 9 Awesome Posts About Web Performance.

Needless to say, it was fun to see people sharing the post and responding to it.

Medium is a fantastic platform to write on. The design is great and I love reading Medium content. I will definitely be using Medium to write in the future.

>Read: The Principles of Performance by Design on Medium

Social Media Share Buttons’ Impact on Website Performance

Social media share buttons can be easily added to any website. The buttons make it simple for users to share the page, and display the number of times people have shared that page. This might make it seem like a no-brainer to include on every website you design, but these buttons come at a cost to performance.

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