Internet Marketing For Artists - Google Speed Penalties

Google has announced that websites that take too long to load will be pushed further and further down the search results. Google is a business and the people who search it everyday including you, are it's customers. If a website loads too slowly the searcher will click on another result and leave the site. This makes this slow loading site less appealing to the search engine and will not give it a high search result.
How does this effect your website? As an artist you probably have a ton of photos and images of your artwork and maybe even a store to sell from. The biggest perpetrator of a slow loading website are photos that are too large. I'm not talking about the size of the picture as compared to your webpage, but the file size itself. Anytime you want to see the size of any of your photos, open the folder on your computer where you keep your photos right click on one and choose "properties." The next window will show the size of your photo.
How can you make it smaller? Use an free online image file conversion service such as PicResize.com to choose a smaller file size so that your images will load faster. You don't want to mess with Google when they are on the warpath. They are still the main place to get traffic and they have the lion's share of the market when it comes to searches. You can avoid other Google penalties by getting the proper education and training to make your internet experience the best it can be.