How often have you searched for your own site using a search engine? Were you pleased with your site’s placement, or were you left wondering why other sites that weren’t as well designed as yours placed higher? SEO, or search engine optimization, can help you reach that top spot. Here are a few tips to show you how. Read on bludwing.
When setting up a page for SEO, avoid the temptation to set up text or links specifically to manipulate search engines. For example, text that is the same color as the page background, text that is invisibly tiny, or links that are only a few pixels wide, will set off alarms at the search engine. These “black hat” methods can get your site banned entirely from the listings.
To help site crawlers better understand your site, you should use keywords as your anchor text for internal links. Non-descript links such as, “click here,” do not help your site as they offer no information to the search engines. This will also help your site to appear more cohesive to human visitors.
Achieve more success in search engine optimization by registering with Yahoo!. Yahoo! is one of the most popular search engines on the internet. Although it is a pricey membership (it costs about 300 dollars a year), it is well worth it if you want that extra boost in your search result presence.
Unfortunately, there are some great technical aspects of websites that can hurt your search engine optimization. For instance, you should avoid Flash plug-ins if you can allow it. Flash uses images, and search engines only read a site’s text to determine its relevance. Even if you have great text content within Flash, most search engines won’t be able to detect it.
Keywords are the backbone of search engine optimization. Keywords, when written, should be italicized, underlined, and bold when possible. Check into the backlinks of those you consider competitors. Copy their backlinks creatively. You need backlinks pointing at your site as much as possible. Get backlinks from sites that have the same theme as yours.
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.
Link to pages offering similar or related goods and services. Target your marketing to likely customers by providing a link to your website from pages offering goods or services related to what you offer. For example, if a consumer needs a mattress, they will likely need sheets and blankets as well.
If you are running an internet search, it is useful to know, that the first page of search results, are the ones that have the most pertinence to your query. As such, clicking on them, should provide you with the best answers about the topic of concern.
Every link on a website that leads to an external site should be validated regularly. Links that point to missing content (broken links) are bad news. Not only are broken links annoying to website visitors, they are penalized by search engine indexing algorithms. Fixing or deleting broken links improves a website’s position on the search engine results pages.
Links from outside pages to your site will help make your site more legitimate to the engines. Ask your readers or friends to link to you from their sites. It helps if they can mention your particular keywords in the link so try providing them the HTML to link to so that you can control what it says.
Keep your site updated but do not spend time making small changes. If you are constantly make small insignificant updates to your page the search engines think that you are just trying to get the date changed for when the last update was done. You will get ranked down for this after it notices it a few times.
Do not duplicate content within your site to try to get more pages into the search rankings. This is considered spamming by the search engines and can get you banned. Keep making unique content for your keywords on different pages to add more of your site to the index of the search engines.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a marketing technique that is meant to drive targeted traffic to your site and gain search engine ratings. The idea is to get the highest ranking you can to earn the top stop when people are looking for what you have.
Make sure your code is lean, not heavy. Use external javascript or iframes to ensure that your actual page is loading quickly and smoothly. The items that end up in javascript or an iframe, like advertising, tends not to be something you would want indexed by a search engine anyway.
Put your navigation at the end of your code. You want the search engine to spider the copy on your page before it leaves to visit other parts of your website; so give it what it needs! Feed it the content first, and then leave the site map and other navigation at the bottom where it belongs.
Try to make the pages of your site look similar to make the user experience easier. If the layout of your pages keeps a “buy” button in the same place, or the title in the same location, then not only will the user have an easier time navigating, but so will the search engine spider!
The best way to get people to visit your website is to design a good page. The purpose of your site dictates the features that make it great or not so great. The design needs of an online store are not the same needs of a blog. Sometimes simplicity makes the best site of all. Remember, the goal is to be user friendly.
Following these tips is only the start. You’ve got to find out more about SEO and investigate other sites to see what makes them work. The more SEO information you have, the more your site will benefit and rise in search engine- result rankings. Keep with it and soon your site will be at the very top. Learn more bludwing.
