If search engine optimization was an easy thing to do, you wouldn’t be here right now trying to learn some great tricks of the trade. The truth is, that it can be very confusing to efficiently optimize your web pages to a search engine’s liking. A lot goes into the process. Find out about some of that process below.
Be smart with where you place the keywords in your site. Makes sure to place them in aspects of your sites such as titles, URLs, content, image names, etc. Think about what terms your visitors would use to find your content and what they’d expect to see when they arrived.
Take the time to create a site map for your website. This is a page listing that provides a list of all of the pages and links of your site so that search engine spiders can easily search your site. Using that site map makes your visitors have to use fewer clicks to go to where they want to go.
Try to move yourself away from the more rigid AP style rules, especially on second references, and toward an SEO-friendly usage of full names in subsequent references within your story. This will benefit you because the search engine results page is still based, in part, on keyword density and repetition.
When looking to optimize your site for search engines, don’t forget to take a look at the competition. Bring up a Google search and see what keywords your competition is using, and if their site is ranked higher than yours. If you find that you’re not on top, rewrite some of your keywords to give yourself the advantage.
To keep search engines from ignoring your site, only use original content. Copying and pasting product descriptions from your merchant’s site may save you time, but it will also lower your site’s page ranking. To assure your page rank remains high, take the time to write your own content. If you don’t have time to write, hire a copywriter to create original content for you.
Copyright your website! Let others know that the content on your site is truly your own. Search engines take this into consideration for their rating levels, and it also adds rapport for your customers. It lets you establish that you are trustworthy, and that your content is unique and fresh.
Use the alternate text for your images as another spot to put your keyword phrase. This works very well because you give another keyword to be crawled by the engines but it allows you to hide it from your readers keeping your site more reader friendly. Be careful though because it will still count towards keyword stuffing and you want to avoid that.
Avoid guilt by association and check the pagerank of your outbound links on a regular basis. Just like a neighborhood can go bad, so can a website. Pagerank will tell you if the site is still considered good. If it’s changed get that link off your page asap.
Increase your visibility to search engines by taking steps to ensure that your site’s title, keyword tags, and page description are not duplicated anywhere within the domain. Each and every page must have its own unique title, meta description, and meta keywords tag embedded within the site’s HTML code.
If you own a blog then you should make sure to spend the time researching keywords. This is a very important part of search engine optimization. Check your blog stats and you should see keywords that people use to get to your blog. Use this list to figure out what your next blog post should be as you already know people are searching for those terms.
Be very careful if you’re sponsoring links! Unless the links are actually within content that someone will want to read, they just don’t work. A good use of a paid link would be having your website linked to from a blog post reviewing an item you sell as that would drive targeted traffic to your site.
A great way to include keywords on your page is to add captions to your images. Readers like it when you do this, as it adds more explanation for what is contained in the images, which is much easier to find than if it’s within the copy itself and it gives search engines more text to index.
Using words like “photo”, “image”, or “picture” in the ALT text on your IMG tags can help target searchers to your site. People will often search for a keyword plus one of those three words to try to find the graphic they’re looking for. Bring them to your site and provide the information!
When writing your site’s title tags, you should include the keywords; this makes them more appealing and visible to searchers. Your brand name, if you choose to include it in your SEO strategy, should be positioned within the first five or six words. Otherwise, it should be placed near the end of your title tag.
A tag cloud is a great way to link users to specific topics they might be interested, and is useful as a tool to see whether you have correctly focused your web pages on your desired keywords. However, tag clouds can also be considered keyword stuffing which will have a negative impact on your search engine optimization. Therefore, you should limit your use of tag clouds and keep track of whether the tag clouds you do have, are used often enough by visitors to justify their existence.
If you are looking for immediate search engine optimization results but are not quite sure how to proceed, a SEO consulting firm might be the answer you need. However, you should first get references and research into whether the firm has successfully delivered results in the past. The reason for this is that there are a lot of firms will try to artificially boost your rank by purchasing many meaningless links that do not generate traffic. Search engines not only frown upon this practice but will also penalize your website for it! Make sure you are not paying for something that will ultimately hurt you.
As stated at the start of this article, it’s all about what the search engine likes. As the search engine sends a search bot to crawl around your website and pull up keywords and phrases, you need to make sure that your site is formatted correctly. Apply the tips from this article and you can improve your overall ranking.
