Tuesday, 29 September 2015

How a Better Content Delivery Network Can Boost Your SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of making sure your business website is found by more potential customers. Updating your content regularly is one of the ways you can boost your SEO.

However, it’s not always keep your content fresh without causing other problems. Dynamic content can slow down your page’s loading time, impacting user experience and influencing your SEO.

Slow Website Loading = Lower Search Rankings

In the decade that I’ve been writing online, things have changed quite a bit. In the old days, using keywords alone could be an effective way to boost your placement in search engine results. Today, the story is different. Google has constantly improved its algorithm and there are hundreds of factors used to determine your search engine rankings when people search for you.

One of the factors considered is page load speed. Google began incorporating site speed into its rankings in 2010, and it’s still an important aspect of SEO today. Search engine rankings aren’t just about keywords and relevance anymore. It’s also about the quality of the total user experience.

When your website loads slowly in comparison to other sites in the space, you run the risk of alienating visitors. They want to be able to see the information they are looking for quickly. The longer they have to wait, the more likely they are to click away. This is accounted for in the algorithm and slow load times can slow you down.

This is where a better content delivery network can help you speed up load times and improve your company’s SEO.

Caching and Better Content Delivery

Your content delivery system is the system used to move your content in front of the reader’s eyes. Your homepage, other pages, and blog posts all need to be delivered. However, in many cases, your content is basically regenerated each time a user comes to visit. This slows the whole process down.

One way to help speed things up is through caching. With caching, a version of the page is saved for easy recall, rather than regenerated. With dynamic pages, this is a challenge, since things will be different from the last cache. However, there have been some advances in this area. Incapsula’s content delivery network makes it a point to “cache the uncacheable.” There are other caching tools, like W3 Total Cache, that can also provide you with a way to get your content loaded faster.

While it’s impossible to properly cache everything you might need for later recall, the point of advanced tools is that they look for ways to speed the whole process up. In the case of Incapsula, patterns related to changes to dynamically generated content and usage are used to recognize opportunities being missed. Caching takes place so that information can be delivered quickly—with almost no processing time.

You do need to be careful of caching, though. Because caching makes use of old versions of information, your content might be outdated upon delivery. Incapsula gets around it by having the tool run comparisons so that updated versions can replace the older content. This way, the content remains fresh throughout the caching process, and your page load time is faster.

With so many consumers looking for fast load times on pages, and with Google using it as a metric for ranking, it makes sense to upgrade your content delivery system. Run a comparison of different options, and see if you can find one that fits your needs and your budget.

The post How a Better Content Delivery Network Can Boost Your SEO appeared first on AllBusiness.com.

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