Some people are talking about relationship between the loading speed of web pages and search result rankings. Is there really such a relation?
Search Engines Care
Actually, search engines do care about the loading speed of pages. In fact, Yahoo (Yslow 
) and Google (Page Speed ) offer loading speed optimizing tools for free. From a technical point of view, if all the web pages on the Internet got faster even by just 1/100 seconds, that would be quite a speed up for search engines who lag behind the rest of them.
No Better Rankings
If you were to help the search engines by optimizing your page, the search engine would give you better rankings as a reward. This sounds like it makes sense, but the search engines' utmost goal is to provide relevant search results and make the users happy. It doesn't do anything for the loading speed of the pages. Some could argue that fast loading pages give users better experience. But it still doesn't do anything for search relevancy. Here, the relation between loading speed and search rankings is just a hoax.
Worth Doing It
Even though there won't be any improvement on search results, it is worth optimizing it. As low power devices like iPad and netbooks are getting popular, optimizing your web pages for those devices becomes more valuable. It speeds up your pages for your users, not for search results.
© July, 2010