If you don’t work with SEO regularly then you’re probably not familiar with evolution of Google over the past 20 years. In the beginning Google created something the world had never seen before by creating an efficient way of filtering content for internet searches by calculating a site’s prowess based on the amount of other websites that would link to it. The idea here is that instead of ranking websites that used a given word the most (the old way search engines worked) they would judge the quality of its content based on how many other websites actually directed users to said website. By this standard, Google was assuming that if it is quality content and a great reference for whatever you might be searching for, people would link to it on their site because they information it provided was legitimate. Easy enough, right? Nothing could go wrong here. The honor system would prevail is it always does.
Uhhhhh…not quite.
Over the last 20 years Google has been working diligently to improve the overall search quality for everyone in various ways. Up to this day, they implement somewhere around 600 changes a year to their algorithm, all with the focus of creating a more positive user experience with each change. These changes to don’t always fall in line with the information that is actually brought to the top of the search. As of the past two years there has been more of a push to improve one aspect of User Experience, site speed. This is not to say this is just now happening. Site speed has always been a consideration but has gained more emphasis of the past two years especially with the increase in internet browsing on mobile phones. This has become one of the most prominent topics in the SEO industry, leading to the idea if that your site cannot load in under three seconds then your rankings could be negatively affected. This may seem like complete craziness to those that aren’t familiar with the process of building a website but luckily this is a realistic goal. There are many things you can do to bring your site load time down to that magical three second mark. Today we’re going to focus on the benefits of one way; AMP’s.
An AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) is a web page that is broken into very basic elements so that it runs faster instead of having to wait to load slow resources (i.e. videos, gif’s, etc.). There are still ways to include interactions and videos on these pages but have to be run with AMP based code, making it load within a literal second or two. I’m not going to lie to you though, this can take a little bit of work. There are some workarounds like using certain plugins if you have a WordPress site but unfortunately if you’ve done it yourself then you’re going to have to create each page using AMP elements. It’s not incredibly hard but will take a little extra. Trust me when I say though that it is well worth the extra effort. Here’s four reasons to create AMP page sites.