Google has made it known that site speed matter in search rankings, and now, with a bigger emphasis on the user experience, site speed will continue to be a critical ranking factor. Nobody likes to wait, and we are becoming accustomed to faster load times, which means your site will be exited if a user has to wait. Here are a few important things you can do to speed up site speed:

Test site speed using Google or other tools.
Ensure your web server can handle your website needs. Overloaded web servers can slow down load times.
You may also find that one of the following culprits is slowing down times:

Embedded videos or media
Using a lot of images
Images that are not compressed
Clunky coding
Using a lot of plugins

Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo may slowly take a bigger piece of the market in 2015. Yahoo is the default search engine for Firefox. Safari had a deal with Google, which is supposed to end in 2015, and Yahoo and Bing are both trying to become the default search engine for the browser. As other search engines become the default Web browsers instead of Google, it makes sense to optimize for those search engines as well.

After all of the changes with the search engine algorithms, inbound SEO links are the biggest influence for search engines. This probably won't change. Earning a link from a high quality, relevant website will not only help with SEO but also with referral traffic. Creating incredible content that people will want to share is still the best way to earn links.

Keeping a WordPress site up to date is vital, this ensures that all your active plugins are also kept up to date. Some fear that updating WordPress or plugins will break things, but a hacked site is the most common outcome from outdated versions. Having validated backups is vital for ensuring your website can recover from any issue. Test your backups, ensure that you not only know how to restore your site, but that the backups were successful. Store them off-site in a cloud storage account.

Use WordPress security plugins and services that keep hackers out. Having a password that is long, complex, and not easily guessable is the best security practice of all. Change your passwords every three to six months to limit the possibility of someone hacking or using old passwords you used to use. Another common way a site can be attacked is from allowing rogue users to have unnecessary access. Periodically go through and clean out your WordPress users. Many times there are old users that will still have unlimited access.

Whatever you may have heard, the core WordPress software is very secure. So why do you hear about WordPress sites being hacked? These security breaches occur not because of a vulnerability in the WordPress software, but because of weak passwords, vulnerabilities in plugins or themes, and not keeping the software up to date. If Sony and Apple are getting hacked, nothing is ever 100% secure. So you want to take steps to make your websites as secure as possible.

Considering Google announced in 2014 that AdWords would no longer rely on exact match keywords, but also co-varieties of a keyword, it's likely the same holds true for organic search, although it has not been explicitly announced. Keywords no longer need to be the exact same variation as displayed in your keyword tool. For example, the plural keyword, is equivalent to the singular form with AdWord’s new targeting strategy. If a searcher misspells, Google will help them find your website despite the variation of the keyword optimized on your site.

The days of keyword stuffing are over, but you still need to keep your site pages optimized around one central idea and keyword. Keywords should appear in on page elements like the page title, heading, image ALT text, and naturally throughout the page copy, but make sure to design each of these items for humans, not search engines.

Most consumers wait about three seconds for a website to load on a desktop or laptop, and about 5 seconds on their mobile device. Amazon found that if their pages slow down by one second, they lose $1.6 billion a year. Google uses page load time as a factor in their ranking algorithm. If you have images that slowly drool down the screen and take over 15 seconds to load, you can say goodbye to prospective customers.

ALT tags are a text alternative to images when a browser can't properly render them. Even when the image is rendered, if you hover over it with your mouse pointer, you can see the ALT tag text created for that image. The ALT attribute also adds SEO value to your website. Adding appropriate ALT tags to the images on your website can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by associating keywords with the images. As a matter of fact, using ALT tags is probably the best way for your eCommerce products to show up in Google image and web search. The number one priority when it comes to image optimization is to fill out each ALT tag for every product image on your site.

Simple rules when it comes to ALT tags:

1) Describe your images in plain English, just like you do for image file names.
2) If you sell products that have model number or serial numbers, use them in your ALT tag.
3) Do not keyword stuff your ALT tags.
4) Don't use ALT tags for decorative images. Search engines may penalize you for over-optimization.
5) Check your website from time to time. View the source of your pages and check to see if your ALT tags are filled out.

It's really easy to keep the default file name your camera gives your images. But it's not a good idea. When it comes to SEO, it's important to use acceptable keywords to help your webpage rank on search engines. Creating descriptive, keyword rich file names are important for image optimization. Search engines don't just crawl the text on your webpage, they also search for keywords within your image file names.

Think about how your customers search for products on your website. What naming patterns do they use when they search? Look at your website analytics, and see what phrasing patterns your customers use to perform searches. Determine the most common naming patterns, and apply that to your image naming process. If you are not going to get that detailed, just be sure to use good keywords when naming your images.