SEO Training: Lesson 2- The On Page Optimization Factors That Matter

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 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.

Meta tags are important 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. However, they may be used to verify other aspects of your website and are important for getting users to click through from search engine results.

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.

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.

The last tag you should use is the robots tag. This tag informs search engines that they should spider your entire web page. The prevailing thought is that if the tag is not found on your page, spiders will automatically search it. I for one don’t like to leave things to chance so I either include it on the page or at the server level. This ensures that all of my pages get indexed (Note: always include a link to your sitemap from your home page).

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 within 5 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: http://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 www.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.

Before you begin any search engine optimization effort, 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.