Google is all about speed.  It wants to deliver search results to the user fast and it wants Googlebot to crawl websites fast.  Want your site to rank in Search Engines?  You better take your reducing website load time into account.  SEO 101: Make Google happy.  The other search engines will usually follow.

So, you have done your research and made a list of keywords to target.  You selected your domain name.  You have your site layout wrapped up and you have all your content together.  Now what?

First, the obvious things:  Keep all your website files as small as possible.  That 3Mb picture of your girlfriend holding the cat with the sunglasses is great, but it’s gonna take a long time to load.  Scale that thing down!  While you’re at it, check the image export settings of your graphics program.  You may be able to reduce its file size even more.

Another basic thing to do is to call your Javascript and CSS from separate files.  Don’t cram that stuff into the code of the page, c’mon.  Smaller files load faster.  Google is all about speed.

After you have optimized the content of your website and uploaded it to your server, your server can compress things even more before sending the content to the visitor’s web browser.  If your website runs on an Apache web server, you can use mod_deflate.  Here’s how to set that up:

First, you have to have mod_deflate enabled.  Your web host can help with that.

After that, edit your .htaccess file and specify what files you want to compress:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript


The above example just differentiates the options available. You can put all of that on a single line, if you prefer:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/xml application/javascript application/x-javascript

Then, verify that your site is using its new compression settings and that there are no errors.  Check it here.

Lastly, bask in the glory and watch as Google gobbles up your website’s content.  You can check this item off of your SEO To Do list.