After you’ve selected the keywords you want to optimize your website for, you need to focus on what is called on-page optimization. On page optimization is what you do on your website pages to improve organic rankings. The good news is that through years of trial and error, research, and modeling top ranked web sites, I have identified the most important on page factors for improving organic rankings.
There are a number of areas to focus on when thinking about on page optimization. The most important factors include meta tags, load speed, and URLs. Although some of these may seem obvious to those of you who have spent just a little time learning about SEO, individuals often address these important areas incorrectly.
Meta tags provide large search engines a quick way to identify what a web page is all about. When tags are formatted correctly, search engine spiders have an easy way of evaluating content and properly ranking web pages. Although meta tags alone can’t significantly improve a web site’s ranking, they can definitely hurt if not properly formatted. You need to integrate additional on page optimization best practices but properly formatted meta tags are essential.
The most important meta tags are the title and descriptions tags. The title tag should be limited to sixty characters and include your keyword phrase at the beginning. Sixty characters is the max displayed by Google and although the search engine may recognize additional characters, they will not be shown. Make sure that your description tag is compelling, less than one hundred fifty characters and include a keyword phrase two times.
The last meta tag worthy of description is the keyword tag. This tag is misused all too often and it may actually be hurting your search engine rankings. When using a keyword tag, focus on only a dozen of your most important and highly trafficked keywords. Search engines should know that you are an authority site and worthy of top rankings. Do your research and only include the keywords that truly matter. You can also evaluate the sites in the top positions and model their keywords as long as they are included on your web site or blog.
When users search the web, they are not only looking for valuable content related to their query, they are also looking for well performing web sites. The second factor we need to look at for on page optimization is load time. Be aware of how quickly your web site pages load and continually work to make the faster. When sites load quickly, major search engines take notice and improve rankings. Focus on user experience in addition to a properly formatted web page and success happens more quickly
The final topic we are going to cover is URL structure. The ideal structure is to have your most important keyword in the URL root. The root of a site would be here: www.keyword.com. If a URL is not available that doesn’t include your keyword, use an aged domain that you can add a folder or subdirectory to. An example would be mysite.com/keyword or keyword.mysite.com. These examples, we are adding our keyword “root” to either domain. Again, this is not as good as having the keyword in your root but is valuable if the domain you need in not available.
Don’t start any optimization program until you have taken a serious look at your on page optimization factors. With a well organized web site that includes properly formatted meta tags, loads quickly, and has a URL which is properly formatted, you’ll be way ahead of the competition.
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categories: seo,meta tags,search engine optimization,Google,yahoo,Bing,web site optimization,internet marketing,web development,marketing
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