On Page Optimization That Gets Results!

Improving your search engine rankings always begins with thorough keyword research. By identifying the right keywords to support your optimization efforts you stay ahead of the competition and make the vision of number one rankings a reality. After you’ve selected the right keywords the next step is to focus your efforts towards on page optimization. This is where you apply some techniques to your web pages to ensure top rankings.

There are a number of important on page optimization factors to consider when optimizing your web pages. I have found three factors in particular to have more of an impact than others when correlating them to search engine rankings. In particular, meta tags, URL structure, and page load speed seem to have the greatest affect on where your website ranks for particular keywords or keyword phrases.

The concept of meta tags has been around since the web hit the mainstream. At first, this was the primary vehicle by which search engines evaluated web sites. Over time their importance declined in relation to the number of factors being considered on an entire web page. However, as algorithms go more complex, the purpose of meta tags have changed. Once considered to be the most important aspect of optimization meta tags are now a way of validating site content. If your meta tags are consistent with on page content, the credibility of your page increases.

Meta tags should include a title tag which has your most important keywords and contains no more than 60 characters. This is the number of characters that can be shown on Google search results. Your description tag which is also displayed after a user does a search engine query, should be no more than 150 characters. This tag is most effective when mentioning your keywords two times.

The final meta tag of any importance is the keyword tag. This web site tag is supposed to include your most important keywords. Unfortunately, most web sites are using this tag incorrectly and it could be hurting their rankings. Keywords are only valid if some of them are found somewhere on your website. In addition you only want to include about a dozen keywords per page. Any more than that and it could be considered keyword stuffing. Focus on your most important keywords and place them in the keywords tag.

In addition to having your meta tags in place, the speed at which your site loads is very important. Slow loading websites are penalized by Google. What’s the big deal with a slow web site or web page you might ask? Google is all about giving the browser a good user experience. If you site has a lot of broken links or loads slowly, Google considers this a bad experience and will penalize you with lower rankings. Make sure that your page loads in less than six seconds on a standard connection. There are a number of tools that can help you measure load speed.

The final factor related to on page optimization we are discussing today is the web site URL. The best format is to have your keyword in root of the domain. For example, it may look something like www.keyword.com. Truthfully the days of picking up a domain like this are pretty much over but you can find some options on expired domain listings. You can also add your keyword next to the root URL by creating a separate page or folder on your main directory. The other strategy you can consider is a subdomain strategy where you would place your keyword before your domain. Most hosts offer this option.

Before you start any SEO campaign, evaluate your web site, landing page, or blog from the perspective of meta tags, load speed, and URLs. There are additional on page factors we’ll discuss in the next lesson, but the three mentioned herein are vitally important to your search engine optimization success.

Need help with your SEO? Check out our SEO training program. Also, if you’re looking to improve search engine rankings check out our Webmaster Training Guide.

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This entry was posted on October 17th, 2009 and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.