seo tips: on page optimization

Showing posts with label on page optimization. Show all posts

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Importance of Site Speed in SEO Efforts : A SEO Technique

Importance of Site Speed in SEO Efforts

There are many search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that bloggers and website owners could apply to be able to improve page ranking and make websites known to a wider audience. One of the things you must not overlook when doing SEO is ensuring that your web site has decent site speed. Why is site speed important and what can you do to improve yours?

Poor Load Time Affects Readability

Google includes site speed as one of the so-called “signals” in its page ranking algorithms, although it “doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.” According to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, there’s currently less than 1% of search queries that are affected by the site speed signal.

Relevance is what drives online users, upon landing on your page, to want to know more about what your website offers, to navigate deeper into your website pages. However, if it takes too much time to load your site, then all the hard work you put in producing relevant content would be wasted.

Negative Impact for Your Website Ranking

According to an article from Moz.com, poor site speed could negatively hurt your page ranking if your pages take a dreadful amount of time to load. It’s something that could hit you if for instance, your relevancy scores and link metrics are pretty close to that of your competitors’.

Enhanced User Experience

It’s true that the negative effect of slow site speed to your page ranking is minimal and presents no serious cause of alarm, but you might be missing out on chances of further improving your rank if you don’t optimise the speed of your site.

Google, as we know, aims to provide the best experience to online users by constantly fine-tuning its search engine results pages—awarding higher ranking to reputable sites and “punishing” those that try to spam online users. Focus on improving your on-site processes, as much as you implement off-site SEO techniques, and you can bet that Google, and your readers, will surely love you.

Improving Site Speed

Smaller websites usually are easier to optimise for site speed. There are many tools you can use for improving site speed, many of them, Google itself provided. To optimise the loading time and response rates of your pages, you may also try the following basic fixes:

The problem with your site could be not the site speed itself, but your Internet accessibility. Make sure you have fast internet connection and if that still doesn’t improve the speed by which your pages load, then you need to make some on-site adjustments.
Combine all of your CSS into an external file and link to it from the <head> section of each page rather than loading it in the HTML of a page.
Make sure your images are optimised for the web.
Reduce HTTP Requests so the pages will load faster. Do this by reducing the number of items needed to be loaded for each page such as images, scripts, and style sheets.
Combines images used in the background into one image, by using CSS sprites.
Server side caching should be used since it creates an HTML page for a URL.
Use Gzip to compress the size of the page sent to the browser. It can also reduce the file size by up to 70%.
Use a content delivery network (CDN) system so that users can download information from your site faster. Use services like Amazon CloudFront, which is an affordable type of CDN.
301 Redirects force the browser to a new URL. This requires the browser to wait for the HTTP request, slowind down your site. Lessen its use or don’t use it if possible.
Use webmaster tools for tweaking your site speed such as YSLOW and the HTML suggestions in Google Webmaster Tools.

Several SEO methods such as link-building and content marketing are still considered by many as the most essential when optimising for search engines. If you think it’s especially needed, however, pay special attention to improving your site speed as it can contribute to a generally positive user experience for your website visitors. Overall functionality and the readability of your website will create happier visitors and will attract more guests in the future.

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This article is contributed by Israel from CompareHero, the leading online portal for financial comparison in Malaysia.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

What Is White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO is the exact contradictory to black hat search engine optimization. When it comes to rousing traffic to your websites, white hat SEO system pursue the search engine course of action narrowly whilst simultaneously, searching for options to catch higher page grade. Accordingly, it is broadly professed as the leading mean of internet marketing as compared to the black hat. Since, basically there are two SEO approaches as in black and white hat SEO. This piece of writing will be centering on white hat SEO.

White hat SEO method can be incredibly successful and they are as well good for your web pages in the long-standing than any other positive traffic driving means. White hat SEO can lift up your website throughout the search results grade devoid of having a harmful consequence on the value of your business and website.

Compared to black hat, white hat SEO yields steady and slow but enduring results. Thus when choosing which part you should follow, you have to regard a better picture. Apart from online promoters, those working white hat SEO consist of software developers and programmers in computer safety. As their job name means, their employment, is to upload organize & order along with protection between computer networks. It is equivalent to police preserving law & order. It is essential to assist search engines to place the content that they are hunting for when it is there on your website. By and large, white hat SEO looks after your status in internet and online businesses. If you exercise it in good manner, it will be to your benefit. People will start in on looking further at your webpage and products once it turns into matching in trustworthiness and excellence. You will also initiate to make their belief and additional dealing for yourself with this white hat SEO.

Albeit utilizing of certain dishonest methods has cause the hunt engines to decrease their reliance on Meta characters, it is still important to make proper use of this feature with the help of white hat SEO. The white hat SEO acts a vital role in the way search engines search for the top websites. It is also very essential to guarantee that you decide for the right heading and titles for your website’s page using white hat SEO. It will be regarded as envoy of the website’s content.

Use of effective keywords is also a significant white hat SEO technique. An assortment of related phrases and keywords should be employed in an ordinary run all over to your web contents. Using keywords is similar to entering into a search container, for the people who are trying to find your website. White hat SEO method will enlarge the probability that they will uncover your website. Particular multi-word search expressions, also identified as long end keywords, are the mainly helpful. You must aim two to three phrases or keywords on every page of your business website, and make sure that you also employ them in the most vital division of your page, for example in headings, titles as well as Meta descriptions. This is white hat SEO.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

What Is On Page Optimization ?

It takes more than just good content to get your website ranked well by search engines. Your site has probably not ranked well enough till now only because your site was not very “understandable” to the search engines. Let’s say there has been a communication gap in between the two. However, it is not an irreversible state. This is a very common problem and can easily be corrected with some ‘On page Optimization Seo’.

Let me start with the basics and tell you what on page seo is. On page Optimization SEO is the process of modifying content and certain html tags of your website to make it more search engine friendly. On-page factors are under your control and can be altered by tweaking the content of your website appropriately. The importance of on-page optimization cannot be stressed enough as it is the basis for search engines to understand the theme and relevance of your website.

Don’t worry; it is not as complicated as it may sound. Let me give you a few crucial points on how to do on-page optimization for your site and be super successful!

Let’s say you have a website that repairs cars. How would you go about optimizing it?

Start with keyword research

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the practice of finding relevant search terms and phrases that people use in conducting searches online and determining the keywords most suited to your website.

So let’s start with your site, since your website targets used car repairs, what words would they type in the search engine? Note down your keywords. It probably includes ‘repair cars’, ‘car repair shop’, etc

After compiling a list of probable keywords/phrases that your target audience might use in the search engines, you can go one step further & use some great keyword research tools available online. Using the tool, you will hopefully be able to conclude on certain terms that are not too competitive to target & yet are relevant enough to connect you with your target audience.

Website Structure

Every website’s coding structure is divided in to two parts: a Head and a Body.

If you are thinking that I am going to teach you coding and programming, I’m not! Rather, I am just going to explain how you can tweak certain elements in each of these sections to your advantage:

Meta Tags

The Invisible <HEAD> Portion

The HEAD is like a cover page of a book which gives direct information about its content. The HEAD consists of multiple tags with the Title and Meta tags being the more important ones.

Title:

The title is what appears on the top of your browser, giving brief information about the page. The title is important because the search engines use it to determine the theme & context of the site, the same way we read the title of a book to know what it’s about.

Meta tags:

Meta keywords is a tag that is no longer considered as important by the search engines but it is still considered good practice to optimize. It’s a tag which contains a list of your target key terms for that page. E.g. <meta name=”keywords” content=”Your targeted Keywords”>

Meta description is a brief snippet about the contents of the page that could be used by the search engine when displaying your site details in the search results. If you do not give a meta description, you have no control over what the search engines will display when showing your results.

The Visible <BODY> Portion

The BODY in html consists of everything that is visible to people who open your website. Think of it like the actual content of a book with many pages. There are multiple elements in the BODY which you would want to consider tweaking.

Headings:

Heading tags (H1, H2 tags) are used to label your headline and are considered important information by search engines. Search engines assume that headings give an idea about the theme of the page and are thought to be given slightly more importance than the page content itself. It should be carefully chosen and injected with relevant keywords.

Content:

You want to make sure you include the right keywords in the contents of your page. You want to ensure you include similar words and phrases throughout the content while ensuring it’s not overdone. Using similar keywords throughout also helps. Although it’s very important to remember that while writing your content, you want to first focus on writing for your end user and making the content most appealing to them. Only once that objective is achieved, then you can try incorporating these changes in your content to suit the search engines while ensuring you’re not compromising on the quality of the content.

Some of us also get so caught up in making our site attractive, forgetting that search engines cannot read Flash animations. So if you want to have a Flash based website, you want to make sure you also include a non-flash version for the search engines to read (some of your users as well might prefer viewing a non-flash version).

Optimizing your Internal Linking Structure:

Internal linking allows users to navigate to other sections of your website. Internal linking plays a crucial role in page ranking. Use relevant anchor text, with keywords of course, to link to other pages of your website, but only if it’s relevant.

Do not leave images unattributed:

Search engines can read only text, not images. By using alt attribute in your image tags, you can describe images with text, letting search engines detect images which are otherwise left ignored. When an internet user looks for images on search engines like Google image search, only websites that have textual descriptions of images will show up. For example: if you have a picture of an Audi, make sure you enter the name ‘Audi’ for the picture. The search engines might not be able to view the picture, but they will know that you have a picture of an Audi in your site through the tag.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

What is a Search Engine ?

Basically, a search engine is a software program that searches for sites based on the words that you designate as search terms. Search engines look through their own databases of information in order to find what it is that you are looking for.The term "search engine" often is used interchangeably. Search engines automatically create web site listings by using spiders that "crawl" web pages, index their information, and optimally follows that site's links to other pages. Spiders return to already-crawled sites on a pretty regular basis in order to check for updates or changes, and everything that these spiders find goes into the search engine database.