• by Christian Weichelt , September 13, 2010

Static Web sites are the remaining fossils of yesteryear's Web technologies. Today's dynamic sites that include social media and personalized content are now the de facto standard for any organization looking to attract and engage customers online. We live in a world where a brand's online presence is often the only opportunity it has to engage with its customers, so it's critical for businesses to maximize each and every interaction.

One common obstacle is that the more dynamic a Web site is, the more time it takes to load a Web page. This is due to the additional computing effort required to personalize Web content for the user based on his or her profile and previous online activity.  Not only do slow site loading speeds aggravate some Web site visitors, the more serious impact to businesses is that a site's loading speed affects its search engine optimization (SEO) ranking.

Google recently announced that page loading speed is now a signal within its SEO ranking algorithms. This forces many organizations into a serious conundrum on how to modernize their online presence without lowering their Google search ranking and giving away precious click-throughs to competitors.

So what can organizations do to ensure their Web 2.0 online presence not only gives customers the best online experience possible, but also keeps them ranking high on Google searches?

As a first step, companies should look under the hood of their Web site, because not all Web content management systems (CMS) are the same.  As the engine of a Web site, its CMS, is one of the main underlying causes for differences in page loading speeds. What follows is a short list of capabilities that organizations should cross-reference as they evaluate their existing CMS and ensure it can quickly deliver engaging multimedia content on their sites:

·     Caching of content objects (and logic) at any granularity so that dynamic pages can be assembled as quickly as possible.

·     Assembling content objects from mixed sources, not just from your own CMS. For example, if you have product information such as price and availability coming from another catalog system, it should be integrated on the fly --and of course, the combined product content object needs to be cached for maximum performance.

·     Make sure that the assembly of the Web site content is not done on the site itself, but on a lower layer of the architecture that is dedicated solely to housing the content. This ensures better control over the content assembly process with reasonable granularity and reuse of assembled objects.

·     Use event-driven cache invalidation (rather than timeouts) so that content is only refreshed when something changes. This means your site is always instantly up-to-date and the cost is optimized. Invalidation events can be triggered by an editorial change using the CMS or by an event from an external content system. In the extreme case it is even possible to pass these events out to the edge of your CDN network (E.g. Akamai) so you can serve a highly dynamic site, with any level of traffic, with lightning speed, all over the world.

·     Ensure that the CMS is proven to scale to suit your traffic requirements, even when you receive a usage spike. Proven scalability and reliability without outages is essential to delivering the best user experience possible.

Besides evaluating a Web site's engine, some additional tips and tricks that Web managers can incorporate to improve their site speeds and in turn -- their SEO -- are as follows:

·              Optimize caching

·              Minimize round trips

·              Minimize requests

·              Minimize the amount of content delivered

·              Optimize rendering

Learn more about this from Google itself right here: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rules_intro.html