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Join UsSearch engine optimization is an art, a science, a mystery and, to the inexperienced, a great big pain. But it need not be so! A little learning goes a long way towards demystifying the whole process. The ideas that follow will show how small changes to a website can have big impacts on the way search engines treat it.
Search engine optimization can be accomplished by many techniques. Having the best possible search engine optimization is important for drawing in more traffic. Greater operation will cause a user to be more willing to use it.
When looking to ramp up your online profile, don’t forget that image names count in search results – quite heavily, in fact. Be sure to give your images names that searchers will easily find. If you’re writing about a particular product, be sure to include keywords for that product in the image name itself, so that the image will pop up in a Google image search result.
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.
Whether your site includes audio or visual content, you will want to have transcripts of the content available. When you have a transcript a search engine will pick that up too.
Try to frequently include different types of offers or sales on your website. Not only will sales optimize your search criteria, but it will keep visitors on your site longer, as most people are psychologically drawn to a deal. This can improve your overall profit and success during the course of the year.
Study the demographics of your intended audience, and find out where they search. If your intended readers tend to use one search engine over another, it may be best to focus on getting the attention of that search engine over others. Not only to you need to consider the search engines themselves, it is also greatly helpful if you are optimizing for the people looking for information in your niche.
Live by the rule that no page on your site should be more than two clicks away from your home page. Search engines hate deep links and often times ignore them. As well, by sticking to this rule, you help guarantee that all of your pages get to enjoy some residual page rank value from your home page.
Search engine optimization practices are something you have to commit to. Every year the algorithms change, so you have to stay on top of things and continuously learn. What you did last year may not work this year, so you’ll have to learn new tactics, in order to optimize your site and articles.
Today most search engines are capable of indexing Flash content on a website, but be cautious in using it on your site. Flash content simply does not index as well or as completely as HTML. For optimal search engine ranking make sure your site relies primarily on plain HTML, and only use Flash for non-essential bonus content.
At the conclusion of your article, you should provide a resource box. This box should have a task or “call-to-action” for the reader to participate in. You should also include a couple of back-links to your website and one to your sign-up page and/or your home page. Additionally, you should include another pertinent link to one of the other pages on your website.
A great program to implement in your search engine optimization is the Yahoo! Buzz Index. This tool, as its name suggests, allows you to view how popular or relevant your keywords and keyword phrases are at any given moment in time. This is great for selecting keywords you know people will search for, increasing the traffic for your page.
Anchor text is important on your site. There are some words that you should never use because they will not help you with your SEO endeavors. A person that specializes in SEO can help you with the right anchor text.
When designing your website, focus more on long-term SEO efforts than short-term. Long-term SEO efforts mean designing high-quality content and updating your site regularly, in order to encourage linking. Short-term SEO focuses on beating the search engine algorithms. The flaw there is that those algorithms are constantly changing, while users’ desire for good content is continuous.
If your site includes video or sound files as part of the content, provide a text transcript. Not only do text transcripts increase accessibility for human users, they provide a way for the content in those files to be indexed by the search engine spiders. The search engine can only rank content it can view, and it can’t watch that video.
When working on search engine optimization, you must place appropriate keywords throughout every part of your site. Keywords must be in your titles, content, image names, and URLs. The page header and the title tags are the two most crucially important places to place your keywords. Be careful, however, putting too many keywords on your site will get your site labeled as spam.
If you have two pages on your website that are quite similar and you only want one of the pages to be indexed towards your Page Rank, then only include that one on your site map. Try to bury links to the other page in JavaScript so that the search spider doesn’t find it at all.
Hopefully, search engine optimization looks a little less mystical, now. It is just a collection of techniques for boosting a website’s traffic and therefore, its potential revenue. Some of them are easy to master, while some take more study and practice. If the tips above whet your appetite, there is plenty more enlightenment waiting for you.
