You’ve probably often find a page that is loading too slowly or perhaps you finally get a strong influx of audiences but it turns out that your server is unable to cope with the demand.

Examples of this problem are not lacking on the web, many web sites suffer from problems with their servers, which are mostly due to the lack of optimization.

But how it relates with SEO? If your server is found to be unable to perform well during peak times, it may also prevent search engine bots to find updates on your site. This will result in direct and almost immediate drop in the frequency of index update. In a few weeks, your SERP position may even drop and thus cause a lower traffic volume from search engines.

Monitoring the response time of your pages is very important. You may need to install a performance monitoring app in your servers to allow complete analysis during peak times and if possible to find problems as quickly as possible.

These are a few ideas to follow if you believe your server is suffering from performance related issues:

• Installing tools to monitor server performance
• Monitoring and detecting problems through server performance log
• Analyzing server response time
• Optimizing server performance
• Examining server cache management
• Examining buffer management

These are just some of the ideas in how to detect and identify performance problems on your web server and its direct impact on the search engine traffic, When examining performance problems of a website, response time data returned by the site must be long enough (between two weeks and a month). The information can be acquired by some webmaster tools. The tool can inform you if Google is unable to crawl the site.

By correlating the available data, we may see changes related to crawl depth and frequency, which eventually allow us to detect the source of the problem. It is very important to know the origin of the problem because the cure is not always the same.

To analyze the response time of your server, it is suggested to use these three Firefox plugins:

Firebug

You will have access to all queries including information on loading time and many other useful information.

YSlow

Developed by Yahoo, it filters results based on five criteria: content, CSS, images, Javascript and server. For each criteria, the plugin suggests appropriate actions.

Page speed

Developed by Google, it advises improvements to reduce your loading time and quicker server response time.