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 research and experimentation I have identified the most important on page factors for improving organic rankings.

There are variety of 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 all have a direct impact on search engine rankings for particular keywords or keyword phrases.

Meta tags are important to web site rankings because they provide some basic information to search engine spiders. Properly formatted meta tags go a long way towards enhancing 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.

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 in search results 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 final meta tag of any importance is the keyword tag. This tag is supposed to include your most important keywords. Unfortunately, most web sites are using this meta tag incorrectly and it could be hurting their rankings. Keywords are only valid if some of them are found somewhere on your website. In addition you only want to include about a dozen keywords per page. Any more than that and it could be considered keyword stuffing. Focus on your most important keywords and place them in the keywords tag.

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 within 5 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 example.com/example. By doing so you are placing your keyword close to the root and giving it more value. Also consider a sub domain strategy.

Don’t start any optimization program until you have 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.

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