If you have a website, make sure you pay attention to the loading speed. There are two reasons for optimizing your website for faster load times. Google has given a small, but important boost to those websites who have faster loading times. Web surfers, are now surfing on their smart phones, and if your website is loaded with images that are not compressed, it could turn off potential customers and readers who either have a slow connection, or are looking for information on their smart phones. Here are some of the top ways you can help speed up your website. Reduce the number of images on your site, and compress them from their full size. Make sure you are caching and minify your website. It is also important that you have a good web hosting company. If you are unsure on how to implement these items, be sure to contact your web designer. If you are trying everything you can to make your website move up in the search engines, your website speed, is one of the easiest and quickest ways you can improve your rankings. If your not concerned about rankings, then don’t forget your potential customers who could be looking for you on their smart phones.

Link building is one of the most effective ways to improve your site’s rank in search engine result pages. On-page SEO plays an important role in ranking your pages too. This article presents 14 on-page SEO tips to help improve your site’s on-page SEO.

 

HTML-Head Tags

 

Title: the most important of on-page keyword elements, the actual page title preferably uses all of your your keywords. The Title appears in search results, making this your first and probably most important contact with potential clients. As a result, write brief and descriptive title, and use a unique title for each of your site’s pages.

 

Meta Description: the text in this field often shows up in the description in search results – a second opportunity to motivate a reader to click your link.

 

Meta Keywords: there is debate about the usefulness of this tag, yet using this tag won’t be harmful if you use it in moderation. Avoid keyword stuffing (using your keywords many times by unnecessarily repeating them)

 

 

URL

 

Length: short URLs don’t necessarily rank better than longer URLs, yet they are easier for your readers to remember and share.

 

Keywords within URL: try to have your keywords in the URL – this does not mean that your keywords need to be in the domain name – just somewhere close to the domain name (for example, if your keyword is SEO, and your domain is example.com, try to have your URL look like this: example.com/SEO  — instead of something like this: example.com/articles/111/222/444/SEO/1)

 

Word Separators: Hyphens in URLs are preferred in cases where you need to separate words. Avoid using other separating characters in URLs. The exception to this is your domain name – avoid using a hyphen in your domain name.

 

Body

 

Keyword Density: there is some debate about optimal number of times to repeat your keywords – too few or too many are detrimental, yet the optimal number is not known. Remember that your content is going to be read by real people, so you should create your content for them, not for a search engine.

 

Keyword variation: search engines are great at presenting results to users even when they misspell their search phrase, so there’s little benefit to trying to come up with variations that people could use to find your page. Target your content to your audience using common words and phrases – or phrases that are relevant to your content or audience.

 

H1 Headline: try to include your keywords in H1-style headlines. While this has little direct impact on ranking within search results, it makes your content more readable making it more accessible to your audience.

 

Site Structure

 

Click depth: place links with highly competitive keywords on your site’s home page, and links for less competitive keywords further from your site’s home page (more clicks to get to the content).

 

Internal Links: linked content within your site improves your site’s overall ranking – keep links relevant to create a robust and interesting structure.

 

Sidebars and footers: most site’s sidebars and footers tend to be repetitive in nature, so it’s thought that links in these areas don’t affect your site’s ranking. Links to other parts of your site, placed before the page’s content appear to have more influence.

 

Content

 

Keyword location: use keywords within the first 50 to 100 words of your content. Ideally, try to have your keywords appear in the H1 title and first sentence.

 

Structure of content: there appears to be little evidence that suggests that content that follows the classic structure of introduction, body, and conclusion has any influence on search result ranking. The ideal structure is the one that makes sense for the content you are presenting to your audience.

 

 

On-page SEO is an important first step in search engine optimization and marketing. Companies like San Diego SEO are experts at on-page, off-page, and other SEO techniques to help your company become visible online, and most importantly, bring your business more sales .

 

 

One of the most important factors in ranking higher, faster, and easier in the search engines is domain age, along with back link age. If you have a new business, and you are just not ready to hire a web designer, or hire an SEO Specialist to start your online marketing efforts, you need to read on. The search engines, whether they admit to it or not, do not give new websites much love. The only times a new website can rank high fast, is for very non competitive markets, where either there is not enough search for other business to worry about, or the competition of business haven’t figured out about the traffic potential. This is becoming a increasingly rare occurrence, and I have only seen it for small population cities. But, if you want to rank for a medium to high competitive key word for your business, you need to plan in advance the time it will take to get you noticeable traffic. Therefore, if are planning on starting a new business, or you have already started a new business, the very least you can do is purchase a domain, and throw up a basic web page. This will do two things for you. One, it will get crawled by the search engines, and the aging begins. The next basic thing you can do to help your new website, is to get free links to your website from places like Yelp, Google Places, Kudzu, Merchant Circle and Yellow Page Directories. This will start the link aging, which will help you down the line with your professional SEO work.

There is a huge difference in price, when you will get quoted by an SEO professional, with a new site, verses an aged site with some aged links. Also, the time it takes to rank your site, will now be sooner, than a brand new site. There is two pieces of advice for business with website now, and no websites. One,  if you have a website, but have not done any free linking, start as soon as possible, it’s free. If you do not have a website period, then purchase a domain, and get it hosted, and get a basic website, and then build free back links. You will save in time, money, and frustration for your future internet success.

You’ve heard about it, your family is using it, your friends are using it, and if your not using it, they are bugging you to use it. But, if you own a business, you are missing out on potentially one of your greatest and least expensive marketing avenues you have in your arsenal. It’s not just about “you build it, they will come” you have to change your business marketing, advertising, and how you conduct your business. But, if you are serious about social media, you will find that your customers and potential customers will be wanting to follow your business and you will make a lot of sales. If you play your marketing right, you can advertise a promotion, that your customers will love, and in return, they will promote that same promotion to all their friends through a like button, re-tweet, or posting about it on their friends Facebook page. This has the potential to become locally viral, and you will see your sales rise, each and every time you let your customers in on a promo, coupon, or sale, through your social media outlet. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well, not every business who signs up on the social media sites, know what they are doing. They don’t know how to get customers to join, or have enough time and energy to put into it. The great thing about hiring a social media consultant is we know exactly what to do, and how to do it for your business.  Another great thing about hiring a professional is, it’s not as expensive as you think. You can choose to have us give you a blue print and you DIY, or we can not only handle all your social media marketing, we can also help with your offline promotion as well. You do not even need a website, to be involved with social media, that’s how great it is. Contact us today for a free proposal.

Just having a website as you know, is not enough to be found by your potential customers, you need help from the search engines. The search engines want to see your website gain links, which are votes in the eyes of the search robots, that your site needs to be seen. Not all links are equal, and some links are necessary in order to start building your online credibility. The very first area I would concentrate on for local businesses, is local citations. Local citations, can come from directories like the Yellow Pages, BBB, and review sites like Yelp. You also, need to work on claiming all your listings or creating them in the major search engines local maps areas. This can be a little time consuming, but once it’s done, it’s done. These are the foundation of your back links, and it establishes your business in the eyes of the search engines, as a real business. Your address, phone number, and business name will begin to match up will all these listings, and make you more credible to in the eyes of the search engine. Once you have completed the foundation, you can start to build your online framework with other credible back links like social networking sites, your niche forums, and writing and publishing articles about your niche. Just these 2 recommended steps alone, will help your website move up further in rankings. If you find that after all this work, you still cannot get to the first page, then this is where a SEO professional can help you. The great thing about doing all these steps, is you made a great starting point for your hired professional, and your proposal should reflect that in savings to you, thanks to your early work on building your internet credibility.

In my previous post, I wrote about Blekko coming on the scene late last year, and my opinion on why I believe they were on to something great. Well, the latest news from Google, is they want to do something about Spam search results too. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and Blekko gave Google a great idea. This is great news for consumers and businesses who have been trying to get better internet exposure correctly. I believe 2011 will be a defining year for quality relevant search results. Google will change their algorithm, and Blekko will give you a spam button or a slash tag to use. The key to your future in search, is not to take shortcuts, you can still get professional help with SEO, but make sure you are getting quality professional help. This time nice quality sites will finish first, and bad quality sites will get de-listed or banished with a spam button. Have a great 2011!

Quality search is here, and is just getting off the ground floor during lift off. Blekko is mostly unknown, and maybe even shrugged off by internet professionals, but if you really look at what they are trying to do, I think you will join forces. Google didn’t build their dominance in a day, it was through word of mouth and marketing. But, if you are an internet marketer or in the industry of search, you know it’s almost getting ridiculous with how easy it is to game Google’s search results. If you think long and hard, and come to terms with what is happening, you will agree it is not good, quality, relevant search. I believe Blekko is coming to the search engine game, at a perfect time, with their open stance against spam pages. If you really look at what they are offering, you will agree that their utopia style of search, is what the world needs right now. So, you don’t have to stop using Google for search or for your business, but you can start using Blekko as a vote and a protest against spam search results. Who knows, maybe they are onto something good, and what’s wrong with that?

Yes, Google is king of search and has the majority of the market share. But, it only takes one mistake, one algorithm change, one tweak to cause your company financial harm. One example of this is Google’s Local Maps, recently there has been a lot of changes that has happen, and your business can suffer because of it. We recommend that you do not ignore Bing, who seems to gaining market share. We also recommend customers take advantage of all the free social networking sites available to keep your business in front of your customers. If something were to happen to Google tomorrow, you need other exposure.