There are more and more articles being written lately about how page load time (page speed) will impact your organic rankings.  (Search Engine Watch & Search Engine Land)

For those interested in knowing more about how they are currently being measured and how to improve it, go into your Google Webmasters Tools.  Assuming you've already verified your domain, beneath Labs you will find "Site Performance".

A recently acquired client of ours displayed the following performance data.That is not an impressive 4 month trailing average to say the least.  Every day came in above (peach area) the acceptable page load times expected by Google (green area).  To resolve the issue you need to pull back a few layers of the onion and interrogate each of the offending components.  Google recommends PageSpeed.  It's not for the faint of heart, but if you have the hustle and time it will break down exactly which of your page elements are slow and also offer advice on how to solve the problem.

This is Google's attempt to speed up the web.  By demoting sites that have poor performance it is announcing to those webmasters that speed is important to users and if they want to rise in the rankings they need to consider the user experience in relation to speed.

Don't miss out on this free tool set to keep you ahead of the game before your slow site continues to fall!