Got A Website? Make Sure Users Can Find It
Do you ever wonder how you can make your website rank higher in search engines? This is all due to search engine optimization. How you put your website together, on the front-end and back-end, influences how the search engines find it. If you want to learn how to optimize your website for search engines, follow these suggestions.
Although novice search engine optimizers believe that HTML must be complex and thorough, it’s actually the exact opposite. You should keep your layout as simple as possible. The easier it is for a search engine to index your pages, the higher you will rise in the rankings. Remember, the goal is to optimize your site, not to create a jumbled mess of code.
To bring more visitors to your website, be sure to optimize your site so that search engines can find it easily. Use popular keywords and tags in your site’s title tag. Search engines give a great deal of weight to this tag, so include the best, most powerful phrases and keywords in it.
Be smart with where you place the keywords on your site. Makes sure to place them in aspects of your sites such as titles, URLs, content, image names, etc. Think about what terms your visitors would use to find your content and what they’d expect to see when they arrived.
Your homepage carries roughly 50 percent of the weight in searches. Up to 5 percent of your copy and links throughout the site should be weighted with keywords and phrases. This density will give depth to searches and bring your site closer to the top rankings on the major engines.
Keep your website up to date and don’t neglect it. Visitors love fresh content. They won’t have a reason to come back to your site if there is nothing new to view. Try to stay relevant and update your site at least weekly. More visitor clicks equate to higher rankings and more visibility on search engines.
To help your SEO, always provide a 301 redirect for any URLs you retire or change. Search engines respond to messages sent from the servers of no-longer-existing sites, and 404-page errors hurt your ranking the most. Using a 301 redirect ensures search engines note the URL change and use the page ranking results associated with the old URL.
Limit the amount of Flash you use on your website and use HTML for most of the content. The ratio should be about 10 percent Flash to 90 percent HTML. Sites that are very heavy on Flash do not do too well when it comes to SEO.
For every market and searcher demographic, there are certain “negative” keywords that will deter an internet user from clicking on your link from a list of search results. Use your marketing resources and consumer insights to establish which keywords are considered offensive, irrelevant, or otherwise undesirable to your target market.
Flash navigation might be pretty, but a search engine spider can’t even see it. If you insist on having your navigation, or the entire website, built-in Flash, make sure you provide alternate HTML navigation somewhere on each page. Also, have HTML pages available so that the search engine can index them and give you a correct Page Rank.
Keep your links high quality. A few great links will far outweigh a plethora of low-quality links, so make sure you’re linking to sites that are worth your reputation. You can also ask those sites if they would be able to link back to you in return, raising the number of backlinks you have.
SEO is a great web tool that allows search engines to filter through your content and actually find you. With a good search engine optimization strategy you can really get high rankings and not have to pay. This exposure allows people the ability to find your site easier.
Omit session IDs and other unnecessary parameters from your URLs as part of good Search Engine Optimization. Short, to the point, URLs are advantageous because people can remember them and because search engines can more easily crawl and categorize them. The result will be more returns for your site!
Skip the high octane fuel: go for the 89 octanes at the pump! It is a myth that buying the highest octane fuel at the gas station will increase your engine performance and gas mileage. Higher octane fuel burns hotter than lower octane. Unless your engine requires fuel that burns hotter than your average 89 octane gasoline, you will not see any benefits at the pump.
As you can see, search engine optimization is not rocket science. It is actually a very logical process. By following the suggestions in this article, you can optimize your website effectively so that your website will have a better chance of ranking higher. Remember, this does take time, but if you are diligent in applying what you have learned, you will see positive results.