One of questions I’ve been asked lately is “What does that little AMP and lightning bolt in the Google results mean?”. In which my response typically is “It means the result you are about to click on is going to load real fast-like.”
If you’ve owned a smartphone in the past year and have searched anything on Google, you’ve probably seen a result that looks like this:
Here are the basics of AMP:
- AMP is a stripped down version of HTML designed to cut out bulky, render blocking code that loads extremely fast
- When Google discovers an AMP version of a webpage, it will index and cache your content on Google servers and make it available to users in the SERPs
- Google will display an AMP label in the mobile search results to indicate to users your content will load fast
- Everyone can now take full advantage of AMP (not just highly authoritative publishers)
For those of you who are slightly more interested in knowing exactly what is AMP, I have found a useful infographic from ClixLogix that illustrates all of the high-level info about Accelerated Mobile Pages to get you started.
without further ado..
Google AMP for Dummies..
They have also put together a useful Guide to AMP that I recommend reading.
For the more technical savvy people out there, visit the How AMP Works page on the official Accelerated Mobile Pages Project website.
Do you have a WordPress site and are interested in implementing AMP?
Contact me and I can evaluate your site to see if you are AMP ready. While there are several plugins that enable AMP for WordPress, often it is not a set it and forget it implementation. As an experienced Technical SEO consultant I’ll help you determine what is needed to not only implement AMP on your website, but also validate your AMP pages so they can be indexed by Google.