Do you ever wonder how you can make your website rank higher in the search engines? This is all due to search engine optimization. How you put your website together, on the front-end and back-end, influences how the search engines find it. If you want to learn how to optimize your website for the search engines, follow these suggestions.
To improve your search engine optimization, find out which keywords are used most to describe the concepts and ideas behind your website or business. This will mean that people searching for information or services related to your business, are most likely to find it, as it will be using words which are most meaningful to them.
When you syndicate press releases by sending out a press release for local or national coverage and link yourself into it and help create search engine optimization. A press release is great to write when you are offering new services and products. Syndicating your press release will increase search engine result placement.
Providing content that can be linked to and referenced by other websites, bloggers, etc., is the simplest way to optimize your standing in search engines. Say for example you are a graphic designer and have a site that operates as your portfolio. If you were to provide unique tutorials on your website, others can discover these, appreciate them and share them on their own site, which in turn increases the amount of times your page is referenced on the whole of the Internet as well as increasing the traffic coming from those pages where your tutorials were referenced.
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.
Submit your site! Many website owners overlook this simple method. Go to the search providers you know and trust, and submit your site to them. Doing this can give you the jump-start you need to start moving to a higher volume of readers. Don’t forget to submit to search directories as well.
If you choose to include Flash on your website, only use one Flash animation. Too much of this can take away from the focus of your description and information transfer, and also does not benefit your search engine optimization. One Flash animation will suffice to create a contemporary aura to your website.
By enrolling your website in Yahoo! and Google’s free local listing service, you can increase site exposure. These provide you with free publicity and that can boost your traffic and presence. You should never turn your back on an opportunity for free publicity.
Use SEO tools to steal traffic from your competitors. Find out which keywords websites similar to yours use, and which keywords are used by potential customers. You can then use these keywords in your content, the descriptions of your pages and the names of your pages to rank higher than your competitors when a popular keyword is used.
Avoid using Flash, Frames and AJAX on your site. They share a very common problem in that they will not permit linking to a single page. It may look very nice but it could very well inhibit you from making the most out of your webpage. If you must use it, use it sparingly.
You will need to make sure that you have content that is of good quality on your site. Many of the search engines are now being more thorough with the content that is showing on the results page. If your site is filled with content that is garbage, it will not rank high as a result when searched.
Always check your headers that your server sends with your website’s pages. There are several free online tools that can check the page’s loading information, so try using them as much as possible. Look for 200 and 301 messages.
You must be patient and understand that SEO is not a process that will show you immediate results. Sometimes it takes weeks or even months to see any changes. If you are a small and very new business then you should expect the process to take a little longer for you than most.
Search Engine Optimization often depends on balancing the wording of your tags to pull in people from social networking sites. Use your header tags to get people’s attention on these sites, and make it impossible not to click on the link! Once the flurry has somewhat died, leave the header tag the same, but rewrite the title tag to be more search engine friendly.
If you can afford to enlist the help of search engine tools like Yahoo! Search Marketing or Google AdWords, by all means spend the extra money. The highly specific keyword metrics and analysis offered by these services takes the guesswork out of improving your ranking and optimizing your site to help it become listed as one of the organic search results.
After you have consolidated pages within your site, cover all your bases by immediately setting up a 301 redirect. This HTML command serves as a sort of forwarding service that will reroute traffic to the new URL, allowing access to the original content. This is especially important because broken links may create the false impression that your site is no longer active.
If you choose to use a Robotz.txt file to hide specific pages from search engine web crawlers and spiders, you should take the extra step to ensure that the file contains the proper access restrictions and permission requirements. Otherwise, you risk tampering by users who are not qualified or allowed to alter the contents.
As you can see, search engine optimization is not rocket science. It is actually a very logical process. By following the suggestions in this article, you can optimize your website effectively so that your website will have a better chance of ranking higher. Remember, this does take time, but if you are diligent in applying what you have learned, you will see positive results.
