Top Rankings are Possible With Well Optimized Web Pages
After selecting the right 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 research and experimentation I have identified the most important on page factors for improving organic rankings.
There are a number of factors to consider for purposes of 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.
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 diminished in terms of 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 the sole criterion, 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 displayed 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 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. You want the search engines to 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 browsing the web, user 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. You should 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 improving the user experience in addition to a properly formatted web page and success happens more quickly
The last factor we are going to discuss here 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. In both 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’ve taken a serious look at your on page optimization factors. With a well laid out 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.
