Website Factors That Affect SEO

Search Engine Optimization is generally comprised of two distinctly different activities… optimizing the website itself, referred to as “on page optimization, referred to as “off page” optimization.
Which both strategies must be employed for the best effect, most SEO Consultants begin with he on page optimization work before beginning their off page optimzation efforts.
In this article, I’ll cover some of the things that can be performed to your website in order to increase its ability to achieve improved rankings. But first you should understand that each and every page of your website need proper SEO.
Following are some website factors that may affect your SEO:

Meta Title

Your “meta title” information is added to the page source (i.e you website coding). This may be done manually by your web designer or added through a WYSIWYG editor if your site uses some form of Content Management System (aka CMS). On some dynamic platforms, the meta title is created automatically as soon as the a page is published.
You should keep meta title relatively short (no more than 60-80 characters) and should include the two to three keyword phases you are specifically trying to optimize the page for. Meta Page Description
Some may argue how much this affects SEO but there are other benefits to writing a good meta page. On Page Content

You Web Design

You may be surprised to see “web design” included in this list but it can affect your SEO in a variety of ways:
1. Your design should be attractive and professional so as to keep your visitors on your site as long as possible.
2. You coding should be as “clean” as possible and should validate with the “W3C validation tool”
Whenever possible

On Page Link Text

You can increase your optimization for a term by using the term in the text link that points to your other page.

Links Pointing To Other Sites

The topics may surprise you but most SEO Consultants agree… the search engines believe that no one website is the be all, end all authority on a topic and therefore expect a webite to link to others on the same topic.
Of course, there may surprise you but most SEO Consultants agree the search engines believes that no one website is the be all, end all authority on a topic and therefore expect a website to link to others on the same topic.
Of Course, there is a downside to this practice… you may find that the visitor leaves and never comes back.

Visit Duration

Many search engines now track how long your visitors remain on your site. The longer the average is, the most apt the search engine are to believe you site is relevant to the keyword phrase that brought them to your web page in the first place

Page Load Speed

I touched on this when I spoke about web design but your page load speed is also affected by the speed of your web hosting. It may not be major factor, but the search engines are paying attention to how long your pages take to load.