Site speed will soon affect your Google rankings.  This is big news for webmasters and surely more of us

Site speed will affect Google rankings.

 will now be paying even more attention to how quickly our site loads.

News of the development of site speed being added as a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm came from Matt Cutts.  Google will roll out the site speed factor in conjunction with its implementation of Google Caffeine in early 2010.

“I think a lot of peopel are going to be thinking more about how can I make my site fast?  How can I make it rich wihtout writing a bunch of custom Java script,” said Cutts at the recent PubCon in Las Vegas.

Of course, different categories of sites are going to have varying load times so its important that you create a site that is not too heavy in comparison to your direct competition for your specific keyword.  There are several tools that you can use that give you extensive statistics on your site load times.

Google has forewarned you so now is the time to make sure that your site is fast or your rankings will suffer in 2010 as Caffeine is rolled out.