Search Engine Optimization: Making It Work For You

If you had a dollar for every service available on the market that says it can take your site to the top of the rankings in just a few weeks, you wouldn’t even need to be in web business. You’d be wealthy already. Stay away from those services and handle the SEO yourself. It’s not hard to do, especially if you just follow these SEO tips to get you started and help you to stay on track.

When you use SEO, you should make sure you site is properly coded. For instance, if you have JavaScript and the code isn’t done well, spiders can’t index your site. A site that relies heavily on Flash without providing text descriptions will be ignored by the search engines.

To increase sales of your products from your website, hire a professional to create individualized product descriptions. Product descriptions can make or break a sale. The benefit you will gain from better product descriptions will more than outweigh the cost of hiring the writer to create them, and will also increase your search engine rankings.

Use alt tags for images and span element titles to your advantage. Search engines look at a site’s code, not what is actually visible to a user, so if your keyword is “cat” and there is a picture of a calico cat on your site, using an alt tag of “a calico cat” for the image will expose the search engine to your keyword even if the user never sees it. The title of a span element works in the same way.

Check each page of your website and make sure it has a META description. If it doesn’t, then you need to edit the page and add one. The description often shows up in search engines, so use action statements that grab the searcher’s attention. This is also a good place to use strong keywords. Check existing META descriptions and improve them if needed. Limit the description to 155 characters.

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.

If you want to make sure your website has high-visibility in search engines, make sure you are using relevant keywords throughout your page. For instance, if your website is about vegan foods, you should use phrases like “healthy vegan recipes” or “meat-less alternatives” throughout your website. That way, people who search these specific keywords will be more likely to see your site.

Using the appropriate keywords in the right places is absolutely vital. These keywords should be placed in strategic spots where web crawlers take their data from. Examples of places from where web crawlers gather data are the titles, URLs, image names, and page headers. There are many more but this is where you should concentrate the bulk of your efforts.

If you choose to hire SEO experts to improve your website you must question them carefully on how they get results. The term “black hat” applies to anyone that intentionally does shady things to increase SERPS. This may help a website out for awhile, but it can also get you punished and your rankings will suddenly drop. Once that happens it takes a lot of effort, time and money to fix.

To optimize a website for search engines, it can sometimes, be helpful to modify the website content. By frequently incorporating phrases and words that oftentimes, tend to be entered as search terms into the content of a website, the site designers can often help to increase the traffic to that particular site.

Diversify when getting traffic. Seek traffic through a number of methods so that you aren’t relying exclusively on search engines to get people to your site. This way, you ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket,’ and won’t be bothered by a momentary slip in search engine rankings.

Choose your website colors wisely. Different colors put people into different moods. So if your website’s color doesn’t compliment your brand, then you may be creating dissonance in the mind of your viewer. For instance, a brand selling suntan lotion would be smart not to choose a heavy, dark-hued background. A lighter color, more in tune with the outdoors, will put those customers in a better frame of mind.

Generate many pages that focus on specific things individually, rather than putting a slew of content all on one page. Search engines may categorize your content as spam if they do not see a logical organization of your ideas and subjects, so bucketing subjects into different pages will make your site seem more legitimate to search engines.

To ensure long-term success for your optimization efforts, you should read up on search engine algorithms regularly. The major search engines sometimes change their algorithms, and you should be aware of any changes that will effect your tactics. You may want to subscribe to a newsletter that will report important changes to you directly.

When starting a search engine optimization campaign the keywords and keyphrases you choose are important, but did you know that the where you position these keywords on your webpage is also very important? This can help lead searches your way. Take some time and do it right and you will have many quality external links coming back to your webpage.

You should keep the URL structure of your site as clear as possible. This will make your site easy to navigate, but also, easy to index for better ranking in search results. You can classify your pages in different categories or by chronological order. Find what works best for the type of website that you have.

As you can see, SEO isn’t hard at all. It might all be Greek to you at this point, but given a little bit of time, the mystery will start to unravel and you will understand what it expected of you by the search engines, if you want your site found among the similar sites in your category.