Website speed now incorporated into Google search engine algorithm

For those looking to improve traffic to their websites sites, Google recently had an important announcement - "speed matters".

The search engine giant reported that it will now factor in site speed to its search results rankings, thereby adding a new dimension to search engine optimization considerations.

However, this does not dramatically change the world of SEO just yet - Google noted that site speed does not carry as much weight as page relevancy, that only 1 percent of websites are currently affected by this change to the algorithm, and that for now the changes are limited to users searching in English on the Google.com page.

Still, the research that accompanied Google's decision has important implications for those who process online payments - the company deliberately slowed down processing time for search results to see how users would respond, and found that visitors did do fewer searches - representing a daily impact of 0.5 percent fewer searches. The same loss in traffic could be expected for ecommerce sites with slow loading speeds.

Experts advise those with ecommerce sites to test their page speeds - Google offers a free tool called Page Speed, for example - to see if improvements need to be made to loading times.