When it comes to the web speed is always an advantage. Faster computers, faster chips, faster servers and faster connections are all about doing things faster. Speed is a measure of productivity, these days, and for Google part of how it sees your website’s ability to enhance the end-user experience.

For those who may be new to this post Google is about two things: quality in search (which it pursues assiduously) and quality in the end-user experience which it has started to pursue with a series of measures which include Google Instant, improvements in Google Instant functionality and new Chrome Browser functionalities like its recent ability to bring speech to search.

The speed at which your webpage performs and the speed at which it loads are now two metrics which Google uses to assess just how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ your website is from an end-user point of view. Fast websites (as you might have guessed) are deemed to be better because they do not make the end-user have to wait for everything to load while slow ones are not so good and will have their Google rankings docked as a result.

Here we get into two questions: How can you test your site speed to see if it really is at its optimum? And what do you do next?

Online Site Speed Test Tool

Google has provided an online site speed test tool which allows you to input your URL and get an assessment of the speed at which your site loads in the browser. More than that it also has specific suggestions which are designed to help make your site faster.

These usually include suggestions about setting cache expiry dates (which help sites load faster) for static graphic items on your website, suggestions to set up CSS Sprites and optimize images. Unless your website is breaking some pretty basic design rules you will find that most of the suggestions made by the Google Site Speed Test Tool fall into the province of advanced SEO which means that you will most likely have to go to your web developers for a little assistance.

The Google Site Speed Test Tool grades website speed out of 100. If you are not in the high 60s in terms of percentage then you really cannot afford to ignore it and any money spent will be worth it in terms of improvements in your Google ranking. If your website performs in the high 70s and 80s there is still room for improvement but it is not that critical and you can afford to put it on your list of things to do for a later date.

Fail to rise above the 55% mark for speed however and you have a major problem on your hands which you really need to address now.

To understand the issue it is important we look at SEO as it was practised before the 2011 Google Panda Update. Up to, the beginning of 2010 webmasters focused on the need to get their websites indexed as thoroughly as possible on the understanding that the more pages of a website were indexed the more keywords would be in the Google Index for that website and the higher were the chances of those keywords begin to work so that both main and long-tail keywords bring in traffic.

It was a sound strategy which had not much changed since 2007 and Google’s Florida update. Google began to change all of this with the introduction of Google Caffeine which was a real game-changer when it comes to the way Google Indexes the web. More than just another algorithm upgrade Google Caffeine was a total change of the Google search operation, introducing, almost, real-time search.

The emphasis at Google also changed. From the pre-Caffeine concept of Google indexing a website’s relevant pages Google changed tack to indexing everything as thoroughly as possible. This meant that webmasters no longer needed to try as hard to get Google to index every page of their websites and, suddenly, the number of pages of a website which were indexed by Google was not longer an indication of its SEO status.

Simply put, Google now indexes everything, as often as possible.

What Google also does however, with increasing sensitivity since the Google Caffeine update and with intent since the Google Panda Update is also look at quality. The quality content of your website is now more important than ever before and it is important to avoid having a website which gives off signals which may mark it as being a spam website.

One welcome change from this is that the battle for a website’s PageRank which would see the Homepage rank well and subsequent pages have either lower or no PageRank which would then lead to all sorts of cross-linking strategies in order to increase that PageRank is now gone. If your site achieves a specific PageRank (PR) in Google’s update of the public side of PageRank then that is spread evenly across the entire site including new pages you introduce.

In a way this makes perfect sense. Google has shifted its focus from ranking individual pages to ranking websites as a whole. It now uses authority and trust to assess a website and puts the onus on the website owner to make sure that every page on it is of value otherwise the website will lose PageRank (PR) in the new update. This means that a couple of bad pages or some overlooked duplicate content is enough to cost you a point or two on your PageRank.

What Does This Mean for Webmasters Optimizing their Websites in 2011?

Google’s change from looking at individual pages within a website to beginning to assess websites as a whole is subtle but has significant impact. It puts pressure on the webmaster to work hard to make sure their website is totally relevant, that out of date pages are no longer indexed and that pages which do not get much traffic are dropped.

It also now puts quite a lot of pressure on the webmaster to maintain their site with fresh content and social media publicity strategy which includes social bookmarking in order to maintain their website’s relevancy in the Google Index.

Five New SEO Tactics for the Panda Update

All these changes spell out a few differences for SEO in 2011 which did not exist last year. The five new things you absolutely need to do this year are:

1. Monitor your website closely through Google Analytics and use Webmaster tools to remove any URLs from the Google Index which are now seen to be low quality.
2. Make sure you have strong on-page optimization on those pages you have in the Google Index. Its absence actually plays a pivotal role when it comes to website traffic.
3. Have a clearly understood internal linking strategy which is designed to increase the informative value of each page of content you use and create a mutual rise in value between inter-linking pages.
4. Develop a social network presence which includes social bookmarking and links coming back from social networks.
5. Employ your robots.txt file, sitemaps, 301 redirects and canonical urls in order to build what Google calls ‘strong signals’ to your relevant pages.

Is this enough for SEO in 2011?

SEO is always a function of time, energy and cost. In 2011 the number of metrics you need to keep an eye on as a new webmaster has definitely increased and the number of activities you have to engage in is also rising. There is never enough time or energy or money (usually) to cover every base.

This is why you need to have a clear SEO strategy in place which, in the long run, will give you exactly what you need in terms of your site’s position and ranking in Google’s search Index.