April 12, 2010 | Hospitality Industry
While the speed of your website doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page, hotel websites that make extensive use of Flash technology or feature framed booking-engines could potentially see their ranking affected.
Last Friday, Google informed that it has added site speed to the list of criteria that will affect your Google ranking.
The company said, site speed doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page, and currently only applies to visitors searching in English on Google.com. According to the announcement, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed criterion.
To help you check the speed of your hotel’s website, Google earlier added Google Site Performance to its Webmaster Tools. The tool shows you the average page load time for pages in your site, the trend over the last few months, and some suggestions on how to make the pages load faster.
Key takeaways for hotel marketers
If your website makes extensive use of Flash or similar technologies, you should start looking now at your site’s speed with Google’s Webmaster Tools.
The same applies, if your booking-engine is hosted by a third-party provider and you have integrated it into your hotel’s website via HTML frames. These frames can considerably affect the load time of your pages.
For all others, the likelihood that the new site speed criterion has a major affect on your Google search ranking is MINIMAL.
Related Link: Google Webmaster Tools
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