How Search Engine Optimization Can Help You Succeed

How Search Engine Optimization Can Help You Succeed

How much money and time have you spent on your website? If you haven’t spent much time on search engine optimization, or SEO, whatever work you have done on your website was a waste. If no one knows your website exists because it’s on page 9 of search results, how will they visit it? Here are a few ways to make sure that the search engines bring visitors right to your url address.

To truly excel your business to the next level, you will have to take advantage of the possibilities that search engine optimization brings to the table. SEO will publicize your business or organization to the public in a whole new light and help you reach more targeted audiences with your product or service.

To draw more traffic to your site, learn which words people use when they are searching for your site. Customers tend to prefer keywords that are broader and easier to remember. Find out what words and phrases are most popular, and then use these on your site to attract more attention.

How you present keywords is just as important as using them consistently. By adding bold or italic tags, you impart importance to your visitors and draw their attention to them. This also has an impact on the search engines. This simple addition brings weight to searches and drives visitors to act.

Optimize your site with an informative error page, rather than a basic 404 page. This page can offer solutions to the error, such as other relevant content links or a link back to the site’s homepage. Search engine spiders will find these pages and index them as if they were content, raising your ranking.

Add descriptive text to all hyperlinks that explains what the linked content is about. This makes it easier for visitors and search engines to understand where the link takes them. The link should include keywords that describe the content on the page so that search engines will associate that page with those keywords.

If possible keep CSS and JavaScript in separate files on your web sever. By doing this search engines will be able to find and index the content on your HTML web pages faster. Also, having more content than code on a web page increases a page’s rank in search engine results.

Make your website URL more SEO-friendly. Incorporate some or all of your keywords in your site address, like “www.mysite.com/antique-book-store”. This will help search engines find your site. Also, use hyphens rather than underscores because hyphens count as spaces but underscores do not. But don’t do it too much; having multiple dashes make your link look like spam and people might not click on them.

Search engine optimization practices are something you have to commit to. Every year the algorithms change, so you have to stay on top of things and continuously learn. What you did last year may not work this year, so you’ll have to learn new tactics, in order to optimize your site and articles.

To help your SEO, always provide a 301 redirect for any URLs you retire or change. Search engines respond to messages sent from the servers of no-longer-existing sites, and 404 page errors hurt your ranking the most. Using a 301 redirect ensures search engines note the URL change and use the page ranking results associated with the old URL.

When making a page redirect use the 301 server redirect as opposed to 302 or meta refreshes. A 301 redirect is telling the search engines that this is a permanent change and that they should update their indexes to the new page. The other types are used frequently by spammers so stay away from them unless they are needed.

Keep an eye on the calendar and plan your search engine optimization strategy, to take holidays, special events and seasonal offers, into account. When you research effective keywords, you will see that holiday-related keywords spike, in the days and weeks leading to the holiday. Take advantage of these variations by tailoring, not only your content, but your optimization efforts, to the season.

Whatever you do, avoid using images for your links both within your site and to outside pages. The engines love text and they love sites that have a lot of links. If you are placing your links in images then you are basically hiding them from the crawlers. Avoid it or your ranking will suffer.

Many people try to start a blog to increase the amount of visitors to their site through backlinks. This is great if the blog has good content that is on one topic. If you know a lot about a few subjects, it is best to start a few blogs and then have links back to your site.

To keep from being categorized as a spam site by major search engines, moderate comments on your site. Spammers frequently use the comments section of popular sites to spam links to their own sites. When search engines see these links, they read it as spam being posted on your own site. Moderating comments will let you prevent these comments from ever being posted.

SEO is the best way to raise your ranking with the search engines so that people become aware of your website. Don’t spend most of your time tweaking design and content, if you aren’t gong to spend as much time on SEO. SEO can be the difference between everyone knowing who you are and no one knowing you exist.