When you decided to create your website, you probably had dreams of thousands upon thousands of readers. Those dreams are attainable, but you'll never be able to reach them without search engine optimization. Continue reading to find out what you can do to get your site optimized for all the major search engines.
If you want to get the best, most specific result possible, using a search engine, then use quotation marks. For example, if you want to know Andy Pettite's statistics in the final year of his career, type: "Andy Pettite" + "final year statistics." This ensures that the engine doesn't pull up unnecessary results, like his statistics from the other years of his career.
Since SEO is well over a decade old, a lot of the process has been automated around the web. You can check out a service like Google Webmaster Tools, which can easily handle much of the SEO work for your website or blog. Google wants you to be successful, because your earnings are their earnings. Therefore, you can trust their tools to do a good job for you.
Add new content to your website in a consistent manner. This will keep your search engine rankings up because it will keep people coming back to your site to see what's new on your pages. Additionally, new content that is well written with SEO in mind will attract the search engine bots. Adding great content to your website is a win-win proposition all around.
Your homepage carries roughly 50 percent of the weight in searches. Up to 5 percent of your copy and links throughout the site should be weighted with keywords and phrases. This density will give depth to searches and bring your site closer to the top rankings on the major engines.
Why SEO Is Important For Small Business
Don't crowd your site with endless repetitions of keywords and phrases in an attempt to draw more traffic. Search engines often end up ranking sites that do this lower than others. Focus on providing solid, informative content aimed at real people, and you will find that your search rank will improve.
If you have recently consolidated pages on your site, you should immediately update your site map to reflect the change. This ensures that the search engines do not determine your site's relevancy score based on dated information. Failure to do so puts your site in jeopardy of losing valuable traffic.
Why SEO Is Important For Small Business
"Alt" tags are crucial when adding image links to your site. These tags will replace the images, should the visitor disable images on their end. These tags are just another smart way that you can incorporate keywords, and improve your site ranking in searches.
Removing all inline javascript to a separate file will speed up the page load times. You will want to put these in a .js include file. This will help you with search rankings as well, and it is more appealing to the eye when set up in this manner.
What Are Search Engine Optimization Techniques
Whenever it is possible, use your keywords in your URL. Search engines pick up on keywords that are placed in the URL. Instead of using numbers or text in article URLs, try to use a CMS that will use real words. These should be the keywords that readers will, most likely, search for.
One of the best actions you can take to help search engines accurately index your site is to create a sitemap.xml file. This file will list each page of your site in a manner that is clear and efficient for search engines to interpret using their algorithms. Including this file can increase your relevancy score significantly.
Use the H2 and H3 tags sparingly as they can trick search engine spiders into thinking your website is spam. The actual algorithms and mathematical equations used by search engines to determine page rank aren't entirely known, but many believe they have at least a good idea. The space between header tags seems to be an indicator of a spam site, so only using one (H1) can avoid that problem entirely.
ALWAYS include alt and title tags on images and links! You can use keywords in these tags, but make sure that the keywords you use truly apply to the image or the site being linked to. Also, don't use the same keywords on all the images or links - mix them up so they're used 2-3 times each.
Interact with other websites and other people to get the best inbound links to your site. Inbound links are like references or testimonials. The fact that other, reputable sites in your niche are willing to provide you with a link speaks well for you, gives your site credibility, and encourages targeted users to trust you.
A good rule of thumb to go by when dealing with search engine optimization is to use your keywords and keyword phrases in the subtitles and headlines of your page. Separating your blog posts into sections with headlines gives you more opportunities to implement your keywords which will allow your page to reach more people.
Make sure that you do not use search engine stop words or words like Stop, Home, and Default as these can be misconstrued. You can have all the keywords in all the right places, but if your title tag contains a search engine stop word, all your hard work will have been for nothing.
Ensure that your call to action is clear, concise, and easy to find. It's great to drive thousands of interested customers to your website, but if they can't figure out where to go to commit to what you're selling, they can't buy! You also don't want to inundate them with links to purchase, but make sure you supply enough so that anyone can figure out what to do.
tag is a better choice than increasing the font size with the tag, since now the search engine will realize that text is a header.
Staying away from flash will be key in maximizing your search engine optimization potential. Many search engines have trouble indexing flash content so creating a website entirely in flash or even with the majority of it made this way can be a critical error. If flash is outputting any text on your site, make certain that the text is rendered as HTML to allow search engines to see it.
Take these tips to heart. Perform daily SEO on your site and watch it start jumping over other sites in its journey towards the top. You won't be able to achieve the rank that you desire without regularly applying the necessary search engine optimization, but if you make it a daily priority, you will enjoy much success.
