Content written by-Creech Jonsson
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complicated field and if you want to stay ahead of the competition, your SEO skills need to be constantly reevaluated and updated. This article contains some SEO tips and ideas that will help you beat your competition's rank in search engine results pages (SERP).
Your website's header may be the first thing visitors see, but the footer of your website is also equally important. You can use your footer to your advantage and assist spiders as they navigate through your site by duplicating your main navigation and making sure your footer links are redirecting visitors to your site's most important pages.
Just because most search engines will ignore your CSS and JavaScript files, it doesn't mean that they shouldn't be optimized to help the search engines out. Leaving these files existing internally will slow the spiders down, because they still have to crawl them, even if they aren't going to grab them. So remember to maintain these files externally.
Include useful external links on your website. The number of outbound links can positively affect a website's search engine rank, however, make sure that the pages you link to are relevant and search engine optimized themselves. It is also best to link to related websites but not direct competitors, as you do not want to lose potential customers in a bid to increase your search engine rank.
Visit your site and check to make sure that the title tag at the top of your window describes the content that you are looking at. Be sure that it contains the keywords that you want readers to associate with your website. If you are a small local business be sure that the key local search words are included in the title tag.
In order to see if your SEO efforts are working, check where you stand in search engine rankings. There are many programs and tools that do this, like Google Toolbar and Alexa. If you don't, you might be wasting your time assuming that your SEO is working while it isn't.
As a general rule of thumb, search engine spiders will ignore sites that have duplicate pages. Having duplicate pages may give you more keyword content, but it may also get you ignored. This can certainly backfire. Make sure each of your pages are unique and original so that you will be found.
Audit click through patterns to see how your customers end up buying (or not). There is software that will track every click visitors make. If you see that a certain page is leading many customers to a purchase, consider making it more prominent on your site and using similar language on other pages of your site.
Search engines hate frames, so if you need to use them make sure to include a noframes tag and to create a full version of your site for the noframes client. If the search engines spiders can't read your site then you are never going to move anywhere in the ranks. Creating a noframes site will ensure that you can even be indexed in the search engine.
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.
After choosing your keyword phrase, purchase a domain name that includes your keyword. It will increase the likelihood of click-throughs, and it will give readers an instant idea as to what your site is about.
search engine optimization how to pronounce is key to rankings and is part of the reason you should always choose slightly less popular keyword phrases so that you are more likely to still find open domain names.
While a site map is a great tool in SEO, it's better if the search engine can get around your site in a natural manner. If the spider needs to rely on your site map, that means your navigation is going to be too difficult for any user to use, too.
Use adwords and adbrite as a form of online advertising. SEO is helpful, but bringing in traffic may require a financial investment. It's the job of these advertisers to increase the hits you get. Using advertising provided by a top search engine such as Google can make a huge difference in site traffic.
Don't fall into the SEO trap of believing that links can outweigh good content. Building a site that will appear at the top of the search engine rankings isn't about beating the algorithms, it's about providing good content. A single link from a high-ranking site will not help you outrank other sites that have relevant, recently-updated content about your keyword.
Figure out what .gov, .edu, and .us websites are linking to and provide it! Link juice from these websites will raise your page ranking substantially. So you have to think of content that they would want their readers visiting.
How Can I Do Search Engine Optimization
If you plan on putting out a press release, make sure it's as keyword optimized as the rest of your site is. Make sure to use anchor text and links to your website within the text as it may be re-posted elsewhere, increasing the number if incoming links. Don't bother adding it to a site like PRWeb unless your press release is really newsworthy.
To improve search engine visibility, a site map is integral. Search engines use bots called spiders to trawl through sites looking for key words, and they do best if your site takes as few clicks as possible to get to a given page. Having a user-friendly site map that requires few clicks to navigate will improve your listings significantly.
Never get rid of a 301 redirect! There's absolutely no point to getting rid of it anyway; it's not like it's cluttering up your server or taking up major hard drive space. Backup your redirects as well because you never know when your server might melt down or your host might go under.
To help with search engine optimization you will want to make sure you site is also mobile friendly. In today's world so many people surf the web from their phone and it would be a huge mistake to ignore that. You want to make it easy for them to see your site on their phones.
Search engine optimization involves making your website more accessible and visible when people use sites like Yahoo! or Google. If you want to increase site traffic, using common keywords is a way to have your site appear on the first page in a list. Remember these tips to use search engine optimization to your benefit.