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.
Increase your website traffic and the revenue from your site by ensuring it has no broken links or pages. Broken links prevent customers from navigating your site. Broken pages are even worse, since then the content is just missing. Broken content can't be indexed by search engines either, which is also poor marketing.
Write and submit articles to article directories. Not only will this increase your exposure and give you multiple platforms to express your expertise in your field, the link to your site in the author resource box will result in higher search engine rankings for your site. If someone uses your article from a directory, that's even better.
Tailoring the meta tags of a website for search engine optimization is a profitable endeavor. Meta tags are not usually visible to website visitors, but their content is thoroughly checked by search engines. This is a great area to pack with the most salient keywords the website owner wants to associate with his or her site.
Look at the source codes on other sites. You can see how they use SEO and the keywords they use. You don't want to copy their methods but use them as a model to develop your own.
Try to get your site mentioned on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus and popular blogs. Social media can be a great search engine optimization tool as networks of people can make a website very popular, very quickly. Every time somebody links to your site on a social media site, the chances of your website showing up on the first page of search engine results increase.
Although search engines will find your site on their own if the content is relevant, you should still submit your site to various search engines so that they're finding exactly what you want them to see. Manual submission gives you a lot more control in the process, and that's what you want as a marketer.
Don't limit your SEO to one country. People from other countries could also be interested in your product or service, so try to get your website ranked in foreign search results. Other English speaking countries, such as Canada, England, and Australia should be the easiest to SEO your website for.
Utilize as many free business listings as possible to increase your SEO. This is essentially advertising that doesn't cut into your budget, and your search ranking will benefit from the increased traffic these sites drive to your website. Likewise, your business and sales are likely to increase as well.
Keyphrases are becoming more important than keywords. Two or three word phrases are the best. If starting a new site, and you are not established with a keyword, you will never get to a top position with a new keyword. That is why it is important to use a keyphrase. Pick a keyphrase that has a lot of demand, but little supply.
Use caution when linking your website to other websites in order to avoid being banned from Google's index for inadvertently associating yourself with Black Hat practitioners. Black Hat practitioners use cloaking, spamming, redirect pages and other deceptive means to try and circumvent search engine techniques. Although Google or other search engines content marketing manager can exclude your website from their index for linking to one of these sites, you won't be penalized if one of these sites link to yours.
Captions for images, articles and other content pieces are great optimization tactics. That means that photos or newspaper articles linked to your site should be taken advantage of, since the captions are often rich in keywords.
Focus your page on a keyword phrase, not your entire site. Try to have each page centered on a particular keyword and keyword phrase. Your site will rank higher if you go this route as trying to build an entire site around a single keyword ends up reading as a spam site.
In order to get yourself noticed you should bold some of the keywords on each page of your web site. Be careful how you use them though, because using them too much is not a good thing and could be counterproductive. Once or twice per page should be more than enough.
There are ways to get search engine optimization content onto your site even if you have no clue how it works. There are people out there that can be paid to ensure that your site is in SEO format. These people can range in price, but are worth it as they can help to build your site to generate money.
When trying to rank in the top echelon of search engine results, you need pay particular attention to selecting appropriate key words and phrases to promote your site. When selecting the appropriate phrases or keywords for your site, make sure that you do not choose ones that are so narrow that only a few people would conduct a search on them.
Check regularly for broken links or images on your website. If you have a page with links that point to non-existent content, it probably won't ever be indexed by the search engines. Search engines have been known to snub sites with too many broken links. Make sure this doesn't happen to you by performing routine maintenance on your site.
Keep yourself apprised of sites which add a new link to your website by using an alert program in a search engine. Set up an alert using "link:www.domainname.com" with your domain name and it will let you know who's linking to you. This is important so you can keep track of which pages are drawing the most attention.
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.
