Starting in April of 2010, Google announced that they were incorporating site speed into your SEO ranking.  This is not new news but I wanted to at least explain it a bit and give another of the factors in the Google algorithm.

(see news here)

This is not a huge issue when creating your site.  As we do most of our SEO for wedding photographers, we understand that pages we’re optimizing are going to have large images, sometimes a LOT of large images and relevant text with them on blog posts.  We optimize a lot of front pages with a large 1600×1200 pixel images.  So the issue for photographers isn’t necessarily getting down to the same size pages as 16 kb of text.  It’s just not possible.  The issue is getting “as fast as possible.”

A few ways to see your site speed:

Pingdom

YSlow

Google Webmasters Tools > Labs > Site Performance

So today’s tip is simple – find a problem area and fix it.  Speed is a great place to start.