Article created by-Gray Allred

If you're like most people with a website, you started it because you want to share something with people. But if no one is looking at your website, how will that happen? additional reading to get people to notice you is by using search engine optimization, or SEO. Here are a few methods to implement so that you can reach the people you'd like to reach.



To be sure that your site is always ranked as highly as it should be, you will need to submit a site map to the search engines. Every page on your site will automatically be linked to the site map, so be sure to create an XML map to submit. It makes things easier on your visitors, and search engines will increase your rankings as they receive the information about your site.

Why SEO Is Important For Your Online Success

To optimize search engine results, never change or retire a page without a 301 redirect. A 404 (page not found) is the absolutely worst case scenario a server can deliver. A 301 redirect tells the search engine the new ULR and transfers that into the search position. Learning how to do a 301 redirect is simple and will keep your search engine results optimal.

Pictures and graphics are great for the visual aspect of your web page. Unfortunately, search engines cannot interpret them (unless a user is doing a specific image search). If you have an awesome image, make sure you have an awesome, descriptive text caption to go with it. If you are familiar with HTML, use an "ALT" tag for this: it will allow you to write a lengthy description that you can fill with search-engine-friendly keywords.

How To Do Search Engine Optimization

Make sure to update the stuff on your website or blog daily. People want fresh news and fresh ideas. They will look for this when using a search engine. Update your website daily as to increase the amount of traffic to your website which will increase search engine optimization.

What Is Google Search Engine Optimization

Make sure to put lots of keywords throughout your site. The title and the page headers are by far the two most important spots to put these tags. Make sure they are appropriate and fitting to the site, but use lots of descriptive words people might use when trying to find what you have available.

One of the best ways to get your site ranked high with the search engines is to place your keyword phrase in the domain name. With search engine optimization, your keyword being placed in the domain name greatly increases your ranking. It may even have enough impact to place you in the first page.

The site map page is used less and less by modern websites, but including one can be vital for search engine optimization. Regardless of its utility to website visitors, the site map is very useful to search engine indexers. A comprehensive site map ensures that all of a website's pages are visited by search engines, improving its ranking.

Isolate content like images and javascript in separate directories and use a robot.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing these directories. These file types have no effect on your website's SEO performance. By instructing search engines to skip over them, you will increase the speed with which search engines index the other, more relevant parts of your site.

Create internal links over which you have control by making several small URLs with relevant content to improve SEO. Offsite links are always better for improving your search rankings. When you create small URLs where you control the content, you can ensure that the content has the right keywords to drive additional traffic to your site.

Every link on a website that leads to an external site should be validated regularly. Links that point to missing content (broken links) are bad news. Not only are broken links annoying to website visitors, they are penalized by search engine indexing algorithms. Fixing or deleting broken links improves a website's position on the search engine results pages.

Stay as far away from frames and AJAX as possible. These programs, while pretty and flashy, do not allow you to link from them and search engine crawlers cannot read the content inside. If you must use them, surround them with relevant content to allow the search engines to make a decision on including your site.

Never stop trying to get more inbound links for your site. If you only make an effort to get inbound links once, you will see a momentary boost in your rankings but it won't last. Having links coming in over time gives you higher credibility and improves your standing.

To maximize your SEO potential, make sure that content on all pages of your site is as unique as possible. Search engines hate duplicate content and having it on your site will only hurt you in the long run. Navigation elements of a site can be similar, but make sure your regular content is unique as it will be beneficial for you both with search engines and human visitors.

Do not use 301 redirects on a page that no longer exists on your website. Instead, use a 401 Gone error page to indicate the page is well and truly gone from your website. A 301 redirect should only be used if the content has actually been moved to another page.

If your business has more than one location, you may consider giving each separate physical address its own page within your site. If you do this, be sure not to simply duplicate all content and just change the location name. This makes your site more convoluted, which can affect the ranking assigned by search engine algorithms.

Using Flash can make a site look better, but it can also hurt the site because Flash-heavy sites are not high on Google's list of great things. It would serve you better if you used mostly text and HTML on your web site and only used a bit of Flash here and there.

A good tip with regards to META keyword tags for efficient search engine optimization is to make sure you do not repeat keywords more than three times within a single tag. This will seem like keyword stuffing to most search engines and your website ranking will suffer as a result.

In conclusion, we have provided you with some of the most crucial aspects, regarding search engine optimization. We hope that you, not only were able to learn something, but also will be able to apply it. Follow our advice and you will be one step closer to being an expert in this subject.