At a recent Pubcon event in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts suggested that 2010 would be the year of speed and this would start to count as a ranking factor. Now even though there are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and each is weighted differently, it’s still something to keep in mind. There are a number of things you can do to improve the speed of your site:

1. Quality Hosting and Compressions – Maybe Google will come out with their own hosting package next year. But it will definitely pay to be on a quality hosting package and one that supports GZIP compressions

2. Use Google AJAX Libraries API – You can host your Jscript libraries on Google ensuring your code is directly served from Google’s network.

3. Don’t cripple your site with embedded media and Flash

4. You can replace existing GA code with their new asynchronous tracking.

5. Keep an eye on HTML and CSS – There is often a lot of code bloat in websites. It’s always a good idea to look through your code and look for opportunities to slim it down.

6. Finally you can test the speed of individual pages using Google’s page speed tool.