Written by-Ballard Hayes

What is search engine optimization? Why should you be concerned about it as a small business owner? For one, search engine optimization is an ideal way to reach your target audiences by using relevant search terms and custom content to boost your page relevancy. This means that your website will gain more exposure with minimal effort on your part. This article will outline several search engine optimization tips that are easy to implement.





When dealing with Meta and title tags on your pages, you have to remember to keep them very unique. In the world of SEO, finding a site that ranks highly without the proper keyword usage is extremely rare, and most of the top-ranking sites constantly change their tags and make them unique to the people who are searching in their particular market.

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. Read the Full Write-up 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.

Even though you want to search engine optimize your website, write for readers first and search engine bots second. Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc., now have some very intelligent bots crawling the internet, but bots don't buy goods in online stores, sign up for newsletters or inquire about your services. Humans visits have the potential to do all of those things, so while you need to include keywords in your text for SEO, keep the page readable.

When it comes to linking your keywords, whether on your own site or on someone else's, quality beats quantity any day of the week. Make sure that your keywords are linked naturally in quality content. One proper, quality link will earn you much higher placement than 10 garbage links. Since web business is a marathon, it is good to plan around quality so that you last the long haul.

Write titles suited for the search engine spiders as well as your readers. Clever titles don't usually convey the content of the article. Instead of being cute, simply create titles that tell the reader and the search engine robots what the article is about. Your title should make it clear that the reader will get something good from the article.

Remember to effectively use the description meta tag on your website, because that is what search engines will use to summarize what a page on your website is about. Search engines will generally use a maximum of 160 characters for this description meta tag. Using the description meta tag, will go a long way toward boosting your SEO value.

Search engine optimize any videos on your website by including keywords in video titles, tags and descriptions. The world's second largest search engine is YouTube and for some keywords Google indexes YouTube videos on the first page of search results. Therefore, it makes sense to use SEO techniques on all videos on your website.

Make sure the title you give to a web page is relevant to the content. You can also include some keywords in it, if it matches the content of the page. Search engine spiders will index your page if it is judged as relevant: a good title will influence this decision.

Have your pages as close to the root directory as possible. The deeper into the sub directories a page is place the less likely the search engine is to rank it highly. The reasoning is that items that are directly off of a root directory as generally considered more important the sites that are deeper within.

If you're building a website for your business from scratch and the perfect domain name has already been taken, consider some alternatives. Adding a hyphen or two sometimes allows you to keep the same term that you originally intended to use. If the name has been taken by a dot com website, see if it's available as a dot net domain. If possible, use a synonym for one or more of the words. As a last resort, consider purchasing an existing domain.

Boost your website's SEO by visiting ".edu" domains and creating backlinks on their blogs and forums. Also search for .edu sites in need of sponsorship. Search engines favor .edu websites and sites with numerous backlinks. Make sure that the comments you leave on these websites are relevant and not a hard sell for your company or product.

Overdoing it with the keywords on your site could get you labeled as a spammer. If you become labeled as a spammer, your site will be overlooked by search engine spiders. They are specifically programmed to ignore the sites that try to stuff as many keywords as possible onto it.

A great tip to increase you search engine optimization is to make sure you are posting on a regular basis. You don't have to post every single day but make sure you are posting around 3-4 times a week. This will keep your blog fresh and keep it active with the search engines.

You have to really be committed to SEO in order for it to help you become more successful. Different methods work at different times, so it is important that you change your SEO methods over time. If you are not ready for that type of commitment, then this may just not be for you.

Keep in mind that SEO is not the only aspect you need to focus on to build a website that people want to visit. Too many new marketers spend way too much time on the tips and tricks of SEO and forget to actually build some content that people want to read.

Search engines seem to love .edu domains, because they are usually educational, well respected, well looked at, and rarely contain information that the public should not be drawn to. If you really want to optimize your website's rankings, see about getting an .edu domain, but make sure it's appropriate for that type of domain, as trouble can start if you improperly use a domain such as this.

One important tip with regards to search engine optimization to keep in mind is to make sure that the code for your home page is not bigger than 32K. Home pages that are bigger than 32K are looked upon negatively by search engines and it may affect where your website is ranked.

If you want more traffic on your web site, using search engine optimization is the way to go. This makes your blog or site more accessible and visible to people who may like to read it. Remember ppc audit in this article to ensure that you get more site visitors who use search engines.