Anyone who remembers the early days of the web remembers that pages loaded slowly if they had anything on them other than just plain code and text. As one webmaster after another tried to outdo one another, pages loaded slower, but the bandwidth thresholds kept being broken allowing for more bells and whistles to be added to a website. Yet, here we are in the 2000s and again, page speed is still a major factor especially in mobile SEO.
Today’s web pages have so much script, code, images, video, graphics, that the pages are a misery to surf and read. Add to all that the obtrusive advertising and outrageous social media promo, and you have web pages today loading so slow that search engines don’t have time to look at them. Search engines see these bloated web pages and deem them either incompetent or part of some scam. Companies want to beat the competition who will have super fast servers and so much junk on their web pages that they overwhelm any attempts at beating them in the rankings. This is changing as word is that Google is shying away or penalizing slow loading pages, no matter who the company or webmaster are.
Google is pushing for the AMP, (Accelerated Mobile Pages) that are streamlined versions of standard websites tailored for the mobile market. The reason for this is efficiency and serving the public with the kind of content and service they deserve. It’s got webmasters redesigning pages left and right because mobile is the fastest growing market. There’s no telling what will happen in the near future and Google is not going to be caught short. What the other search engines are going to do is still up in the air and only inside professional gossip can plug up the holes.
This all means lots of rehabilitation or SEO rehabilitation of billions of websites. All those company websites with enough script to choke a horse, have to be handled. Fan sites, promo sites, all need to be up to speed. The information superhighway is turning into a race track. Simple scripts, SSL, getting to the point of each web page of your site. Google indexes web pages, not websites so any index page may be mobile SEO friendly, but then the rest of your web pages should be so too.
First things first, set up a battle plan to convert to the mobile SEO platform. Never mind what the marketing people or know it all cousin, you need a professional webmaster to grasp and apply the latest mobile SEO techniques. Fortunately, Google has plenty of free tools to build your pages and test your pages. Anyone who can put together a web page can get a great education this way. If you’re a pro you’ll have these tools and your own quiver full of resources to use. If not a pro, hire one. Test the pages to see if they rise in SERPs and if not, look at why. If so, keep on doing what works.
No webmaster or web marketer wants to be caught short in this very viral game of SEO. To some, missing those top spots can mean the loss of millions of dollars. We’ve seen it all, some big shot corporation paying millions to SEO experts suddenly finds their web pages dropping like a rock via some guy in his basement wearing a “The Big Bang Theory” t-shirt and chugging sports drinks. It’s the wild wild west of the internet that brings things like this about. That’s why this look at speed regarding web pages is so vital, if Google goes full bore with AMPs, then it’s going to be a whole new ball game regarding mobile SEO.