Top Rankings Are Possible With Well Optimized Web Pages

Improving your search engine rankings always begins with thorough keyword research. By identifying the right keywords to help you achieve your optimization campaigns, 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 guarantee top search engine placement.

There are a number of important on page optimization factors to consider when optimizing your web pages. I have found three 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.

Meta tags are important to web site rankings because they provide some basic information to search engine spiders. Meta tags need to be formatted correctly to enhance search engine rankings. My research as shows that meta tags by themselves cannot radically improve rankings. It is my belief that meta tags may be used to verify other aspects of your website and are important for getting users to click through from search engine results.

Properly 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 tag, the description tag should be limited to fewer than one hundred and fifty characters and repeat your keyword phrase no more than 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.

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 third and certainly one of the most important factors is URL structure. It is true that having your keyword in the URL helps but it is not the only or the most heavily weighed optimization factor by Google. There are plenty of examples of sites that include the keyword in the URL but don’t rank as well as their competitors. If you can purchase a URL that has your keyword in it though, consider it advantageous. If you are unable to do so, consider adding a folder to your main directory or page to your site that includes the keyword you want to optimize your site for. A good example would be www.test.com/keyword. By doing so you are placing your keyword close to the root and giving it more value. Also consider a sub domain strategy.

When thinking about search engine optimization and embarking on your first optimization campaign, start with on page optimization. Focus your efforts on developing a web site that is easily searched and ranked with the help of the on page optimization factors we discussed. The topics we discussed including Meta tags, website load times and domain name are among the most important on page optimization factors you can apply to improve your rankings.

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