How To Increase Your Online Presence Using Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the way to go in making sure your website gets picked up by Google, Yahoo and Bing. It takes more than just sprinkling in keywords though, as SEO is both a science and art form. Keep reading this article to learn some tips and tricks that can help you refine your SEO practice.

Keyword density is an important component in search engine optimization. If you want search engines to consider your content high-quality, make sure that no more than 20 percent of a page's content is taken up by keywords.

When it comes to linking your keywords, whether on your own site or on someone else's, quality beats quantity any day of the week. Make sure that your keywords are linked naturally in quality content. One proper, quality link will earn you much higher placement than 10 garbage links. Since web business is a marathon, it is good to plan around quality so that you last the long haul.

Make your URL's easy to understand. Not only will the users of your site have no problem knowing what that particular page will contain, but the search engines will be able to find it easier, as well. Avoid in house classifications that involve numbers and random letters. Stick to keywords and phrases that make sense.

Use toils such as Google stats to see which keywords are bringing users to your site. Are there any keywords that aren't getting the hits that you'd expect? These are the keywords that you need to improve. Make sure you've entered them as keywords in your page header, be sure that they are thoroughly used throughout your site, and perhaps use them in the title of one of your website's pages.

If you are writing a blog, optimize your content by using as many heading tags as you can without depleting readability. Start with the blog title in an tag and work down from there, with the main content of the post in an tag. This tells search engine spiders which content you have deemed most important.

To make sure every page of your site is indexed by search engines, do not use Flash in the site's design. Flash does not allow individual pages to be linked to, which means that search engines can't crawl them. A separate link for each page will allow all your content to be indexed and found through search engines.

If you would like to increase your search engine traffic through back links, make use of social media. Sites like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook allow users to share your links on their own page with a simple click of a button. Many Twitter and Facebook pages have high page rankings, and being linked to from them can significantly increase the page rank of your own site.

To ensure visitors will want to come back to your site, work only with reputable merchants. Even though a merchant may offer a large commission rate, you will lose money in the long run if they scam your site's visitors. Working with reputable merchants will give your site a good reputation, and will encourage people to trust your opinion.

Stay ethical. Many websites use what is called "Black Hat" tactics, meaning they use unethical practices to hop their sites up on search lists. These include keyword stuffing, "Doorway pages", and many others. Stay away from these, because if a search engine realizes you are using them, they will likely ban your site from their pages.

Make sure your site is easy on the eyes. Adding interactive functions to your website, like allowing users to change the font to their preferred size, can help to build your online reputation. It is important that your site is designed to attract the attention of both your viewers and the search engines.

When trying to fully optimize your search engine placement, it is a good idea never to publish the same article or blog post under two or more different URLs on your site. Search engines look specifically for this strategy and penalize heavily for it, so do yourself a favor and keep all URLs, totally original.

For search engine optimization, you need to add keywords to your website. It is important that the keywords be both specific and broad, and also use synonymous words to expand your keyword list. The more keywords that your site has, the more likely that it is to show up on online searches.

If you want your site to be highly ranked by the search engines, it's important to select the best keywords and phrases for your site. You want to avoid both overly broad keywords that are used by many sites and overly narrow keywords, that few people will think to search for.

When optimizing your site, pay attention to the weight of external links. Being linked from a site with a .edu is better than a .com or other suffix. You can get a link from a .edu site by finding an academic institution or charity that is looking for sponsors, and offer money in exchange for links or ads.

To ensure traffic to your website, design it for humans, not bots or web crawlers. In the obsession to rank high in search results, several web designers have forgotten to design for humans. It does not matter how high your rank is on a search engine, if you do not actually get human traffic. It is humans that generate income.

Search engines give sites that regularly update with fresh content better rankings than sites which do not update or update infrequently. To get on the top of search engines, it's important to always have new content related to your site with lots of the same key words used throughout your site.

One effective SEO tip to keep in mind: It is to always keep an eye on what your main competition is doing. It's always a good idea to keep track of any changes to their website, what kind of content they have and where their links are coming from. Such research will help you figure out what additions you do and don't want to make to your own site.

Everyone wants their website to get noticed by the search engines so that search engine users can wind up at their site. Keep in mind the advice you have read in this article and apply it to your search engine optimization efforts and you can rest assured you are ahead of the pack.