Improve Your Web Site To Achieve Top Search Rankings
Starting any SEO campaign with anything other than keyword research is a waste of time. To be truly successful with SEO you must begin with a well thought through keyword strategy and analysis. Once you’ve identified the most important keywords for your campaign, the next step is to optimize web pages for top rankings. I’ve discovered a number of techniques that work especially well for on page optimization.
There are a number of important on page optimization factors to consider when optimizing your web pages. I have found three factors 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 have 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 shown 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 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? Major search engines are 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 but certainly one of the most important factors we are going to discuss 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 being outranked by other web sites. 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 or page to your site that includes the keyword you want to optimize your site for. A good example would be www.sample.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 SEO 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 URL are among the most important on page optimization factors you can apply to improve your rankings.
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Bing Search Engine Optimization Made Easy
There has been quite a bit of media attention about Microsoft’s latest addition to the search engine wars. Bing promises to deliver a more customized search experience to browsers and is essentially their answer to Google. In the last few weeks Bing has gotten a great deal of press and is important to anyone doing business online who wants to rank well in the Bing search engine.
You might be asking yourself, what does Bing mean for my website and how can I ensure that my web site is found? I have been receiving a number of inquiries from individuals who are concerned that their website will lose ranking based on this new search. I have begun to research Bing as a search engine and found out that much of it’s methodology for ranking is similar to that of Google.
One of the best ways to reverse engineer a given search engine is to do a study of the top ranked website for a specific term. Based on some research that I’ve done and the work of others in the SEO community, it’s pretty clear that this type of analysis provides clues of which criteria weigh most heavily in Bing’s search algorithm. No one will be all that surprised to learn that older domains perform better than newer websites and in bound linking plays a major role in results.
What I find particularly interesting is that Bing is relying on many of the same factors that Google has been using from day one. The factor you should be most concerned with is inbound linking. All major search engines like inbound links. More importantly, they like relevant in bound links. Use this information to guide your SEO campaigns and determine which sites to target for link exchanges.
Improving your organic search results is vital to your online success. Many website owners or affiliate marketers believe they can buy their way to top rankings. In turn, these ranking produce significant traffic and a profitable revenue stream. However, organic results take time and hard work. If you know where to focus, you will get to your destination much quicker. Focus your efforts on building links and optimizing your pages for success.
Another area of importance is content. Search engines like Bing look for fresh, relevant content. You want to make sure that your content is valuable to browsers and web site visitors but that it is also relevant and up to date. Consider adding a revising content on a regular basis. This helps you succeed in generating inbound links and quality scores from search engine algorithms.
Optimizing your website requires a good deal of attention to search engine optimization basics. By focusing on what you can control, creating engaging content and producing a website that is easily navigated by search engines, you go a long way in developing a Bing friendly site. In addition, you move closer towards improving your rankings for all major search engines.
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