• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 28, 2011

Sounds a bit futuristic, but marketers know the speed in which Web site pages load can influence quality scores and, in turn, impact the price of keywords in paid search campaigns. Google Thursday rolled out Page Speed Service, an online program that automatically speeds up the load time of Web pages.

Gaining the speed requires companies to sign up for the service and point their site’s DNS entry to Google, according to Google Engineer Ram Ramani. He explains the Page Speed Service grabs content from servers, rewrites pages by applying Web performance best practices, and serves them to searchers through Google's servers worldwide.

The speed of page load times not only influences paid search campaigns, but display, ad targeting and ad retargeting campaigns, too. TagMan, which provides Web site page containers for multiple ad tags, has been stressing the importance of Web page load times for years.

It turns out the Google +1 social tag drags down a site's load time. In a recent blog post, TagMan Founder Paul Cook notes the Google +1 plug in drags page load times by one second, "and that’s not 'just' a second when research shows that 10% of site traffic is lost for every extra second a site takes to load."