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 trial and error, research, and modeling top ranked web sites, I have identified the most important on page factors for improving organic rankings.
When contemplating how to optimize your web site pages, there are a number of things to consider. The most important aspects of on page optimization are meta tags, the speed at which your page loads, and the URLs you’re using. Even though this short list of factors may seem obvious to some, they are the most powerful aspects of on page optimization.
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 by themselves 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 vitally important.
The best formatted meta tags should include a title tag that includes the keywords that you are trying to optimize for. It is recommended that the size of the title tag is sixty or fewer characters as this is the limit shown on Google search results. The second meta tag is the description tag which should be limited to fewer than one hundred and fifty characters and repeat your keyword phrase no more than two times.
Another meta tag is your keyword tag. This tag should include your most important keywords. I choose to keep my list concise, usually around 12 keywords. This shows Google and other search engines that your web page is both focused and relevant. Sites that engage in keyword stuffing are only hurting themselves. Consider doing to keyword research to determine which keywords get the most search engine traffic and use them.
In addition to having your meta tags in place, how quickly 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 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 domain 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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