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I recently wrote about “My Love Affair with WordPress”. Today I am going to talk about another aspect of website hosting and how it relates to Search Engine Optimization.

As your web presence grows, you will most definitely begin to accumulate numerous [pl_tooltip tip=”IE images, CSS files, etc…” position=”right”]“assets”[/pl_tooltip] on your web host’s server. Every asset has a load time. Hence the more assets, the longer it will take a webpage to load. Simple enough.

Website Speed

You are soon faced with a double pronged dilemma:

1) If my site starts to underperform in terms of load speed, I know that the people I am trying to attract to my business will not be happy. And may abandon my website for a competitor’s. I’ll call this the human factor (for lack of a better descriptor).

2) Google monitors site speed and performance. Having a site that performs poorly will ding you in terms of SEO. I’ll call this the Google factor (again…for lack of a better descriptor).

Both are in effect SEO factors as inattention to the performance of your website will harm the overall Search Engine Optimization of the site. We are talking about user experience & site speed.

Google does a good job of telling you what you need to pay attention to in terms of SEO. Website speed is one of the factors they look at. So why not pay attention!?

All this being said, one of the factors that can help improve the speed of one’s website is the implementation of a [pl_tooltip tip=”Content Delivery Network” position=”right”]CDN[/pl_tooltip].

What is a CDN?

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics, URLs and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.

Traditional Network versus Content Delivery Network
The graphic above shows the (basic) difference between a traditional Network versus a Content Delivery Network.

More details of how a CDN works can be found here.

In essence parts of your website’s content are distributed across the internet thereby making them more readily available to web surfers who can be almost anywhere in the world.

Without a CDN you are looking at data distribution that mirrors the old hub and spoke concept (graphic above left).

Distributing your assets via a CDN reduces the load and focus on a single break point. It also spreads these assets around the world in order to make them more accessible.

I spend lots of time working on various technical SEO issues. I have found that the implementation of a CDN has always provided good SEO value right off the bat. User experience improves. And Google recognizes that your site is operating at optimal speeds. Win, win… and win!

Have you implemented CDN technology on your website? If not, let us know. We’d be glad to help you spread some CDN TLC!