How fast does your website load?, if you don’t know you might want to check, thanks to Google’s recent updates that page load times may well be a ranking factor in organic SEO. Long believed to have an effect on PPC (pay per click) rankings and quality score, there is rumour this will now start playing a part in organic rankings too.

Finding out how fast your site should load is not an easy question to ask. If your page has interactive features, such as flash, video or photo’s, it is obviously going to be taking longer to load, then say a site with pure text.

However, If your site takes more than around 4-7 seconds to load, you may want to see if you can reduce this. One way to do this is look at your images on your site, Could these be reduced in size, could your we designers place code, in external javascript files?.

There are a number of tools to check the current page speed of your site. One of my favourite is http://www.pingdom.com. Here you type in your url, and you get to watch your page load in real time, while the tool tracks how long in seconds your site takes to load. I find the tool works really well, and because it breaksdown the load times of each item, it’s easy to highlight in page speed problems.

How much of a ranking factor speed is nobody knows however, if you can tick all the right boxes in helping Google decide that your site is an authorative site, with rich content, quick load times, and quality links, you should see the fruits of your labour in good rankings for keywords.