Speed is certainly one of the most important factors when it comes to making
a successful web site. These days’ people have high expectations, they expect a web site to load as fast as an application on their operating system, and therefore even a few seconds of waiting can frustrate them or leave
altogether.

A good website should take about 8-12 seconds (for a 56K) to load. The website owner is going to have to decide how fast its pages are going to be,
for example for a multimedia or a flash site they can afford to be a bit slower than others provided that the users know the nature of the site.

If you're curious as to how fast you're website is here are two websites that checks your speed:

www.vertain.com
www.websiteoptimization.com

Ways to speed up your website

HTML issues:

Use CSS where possible: Because pages with stylesheets load faster than
those web sites designed with font tags and tables, and also it's much
faster and easier to make changes. (Some resources on CSS –
www.webcredible.co.uk,
www.websitetips.com, and www.glish.com)

Stay clear of nested tables: Nested tables are basically tables within
tables, but too many of theses can really slow down the browser. When a page loads the browser starts from the top and goes down in a consecutive manner, with nested tables it has to find the end of the table before it can display the entire thing.

Specifying height and width: For tables and images it's a good idea to
specify their height and width, as it helps out the browser and therefore
speeds up the process.

Page size:

- Reduce the number of images where possible: Most common causes of slow web pages are images, but they are also the easiest to fix. Try to eliminate repeat and unnecessary images, so they are not downloaded the second time. And also try not to use images for words, unless it's absolutely necessary reason being the download time and also they can't be searched.

- Reduce the size of images: Everybody uses different techniques (e.g. converting to JPEG), but as long as the images are compressed it's beneficial for everyone.

- Remove unnecessary multimedia: This includes video, audio, flash and animation, if it isn't important then it shouldn't be on the page.

- Remove unnecessary scripts: Some codes can slow down the site, consider evaluating the codes and making them better if possible.

- Remove unnecessary META tags and META content: META tags don't achieve very much anymore, people used them for search engine optimization but due to misuse they don't hold much importance in SEO.

Good articles.
I do not agree. There some of major search engine players (excluding Google) which still rely on META TAGS especially the META DESCRIPTION.

My bad, i thought that most search engines abandoned them because people were people were using keywords excessivley. What are the search engines that still rely on META TAGS?

Web host:

- Bandwidth: Make sure you have enough bandwidth allocated, it's a good idea to attain more bandwidth then needed just in case of a sudden rise in traffic.

- Capacity of severs: There's a limit as to how many people can access your website so once again if your web site is growing in traffic, you should consider upgrading your service.

These are just some of the basics to speed up your website, there are many other ways you can reduce download time for your website. If you have any other tips please feel free to post.

Yahoo, Hotbot, MSN, Inktomi.
You can read their guidelines for further information.

I see, Thanks.

Reading their guidelines can get a little boring I figured that MSN relied on some META tags but I would never have guessed about Yahoo.

Thanks for that information!

Here's a relevant article from an SEO email I subscribe to:

Interesting, thanks for the article.