Optimizing for any search engine requires a combination of several factors. There are the keywords, the incoming links, the content and so on. But when you’re in a contest like sulumits retsambew, every factor has to be considered; you can’t let the competition win just because you left a couple of stones unturned. And one stone that’s looking mighty attractive right now is size. (Specially, when I found it out as one of the reasons of my steep drop in rankings)

Page size is something that Google marketers haven’t really been looking at, mostly because it’s a factor for MSN and Yahoo optimizers. But does it really play a role in how well your pages fare on the Google SERPs? It would seem that the competitors for Sulumits Retsambew are playing it safe; none of the first 50 results have pages over 100kB, and a good number even keep it under 10kB.

Back in 2008, web masters were all trying to figure out if there really was an optimal size for a web page to get ranked better by Google. Some SEO firms claim that it’s at about 20kB, but nobody really knows for sure. Google, on its part, has remained fairly mum about the whole affair. You can get a few hints from some of their pages, though. I use this tool to check page sizes; it gives some other nice info as well.

I personally liked Serge Bondar’s page size experiment though. The crux is; Google loves and awards fair rankings if your web page lies between 20kb – 80kb. Google bot has a limit of around 500kb. Yahoo bot can index only 210kb of a page and MSN is the king when it comes to page size – it can scan up to 1.1 MB. Though the experiment is pretty old but MSN and Yahoo are not so frequent with their system and algorithm changes. Google changes it frequently though rankings are indirectly proportional to page size. Lesser/optimum the page size; better the rankings.  Needless to say, it’s just one factor and we have lot many to consider.

Tips to keep page size under control -

1) Use of CSS - The use of CSS in HTML document helps in reducing the size of code as it separates the presentation layer coding from the actual text.
2) Clean markups - Always try to keep the markups clean and tidy by proper nesting of the tags and closing all the tags.
3) Use of H Tag - Provide important headings in H tags instead of visually increasing the font size or making them bold as search engine crawlers gives special importance to H tags.
4) Minimal use of Flash - Use of flash leads to two disadvantages. Firstly that they are over burden on the size of the site and secondly the text within a Flash cannot be read by the search engine.
5) Separate style sheet for Mobile devices – You must try to create a separate CSS style sheet for mobile devices containing less graphics and taking up less screen space. This will help your site attain better rankings as your site is optimized for such devices as well.
6) Page Text - Most of the websites have good navigation and separate pages/topics, so page text is optimum. Problem comes with blogs as they’d have many posts on same page, the home page. You might have noticed that posts rank higher at times. Page size is the reason. Try keeping 3-5 posts on your homepage. If you keep a static blogpage as homepage; it is the best. But make sure that you do necessary changes in your XML sitemap for daily updates or static page updates.

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Tags: CSS, Google, MSN, page size and rankings, search engine rankings, search engines, sulumits retsambew, Yahoo