Increase Your SEO Knowledge With These Tips
Search engine optimization sounds very intimidating to users new to online marketing or web design and maintenance. However, with a bit of education and research, search engine optimization can be done efficiently and effectively by anyone. Read these suggestions for a few ways to make your site stand out more in search results and improve your site traffic.
If you want to find a certain phrase and you’re using a search engine, put quotes around the phrase to bring back results with those exact words. “Orange juice containers” will bring back only results with those three words in that order, while simply searching for orange juice containers (without quotes), will bring back results with less accuracy.
To help with search engine optimization, make sure to include keywords in the URLs for relevant pages, rather than using numbers or irrelevant words. This is key not just for the main body of the URL, but also in file names. This will boost your rankings, as search engines are looking for relevant keywords.
Place links in key places to guarantee they get noticed. They do not need flashing lights around them or obnoxious bold lettering, but it is important to make sure links get noticed. Put them in places that people typically look on a website. This is often near the comments, along the sidebar, or underneath headlines.
Take care when using your social media presence to boost your main site’s PageRank. The data you provide on your social media pages (e.g. Facebook and Twitter bios) should dovetail with the main keywords of your website. This establishes a relationship between the two that can help improve the positioning of both your social media presence and your main site.
Set forums and blog comments to automatically insert the following attribute into any links users create. Forum and comment spam are a constant problem, and setting follow-on discussion pages prevents spammers from harming your own site’s rank by linking to spam sites that sell dodgy products and services.
On your website, always include an address where people can send letters, questions or concerns about your company. The more feedback that you get, the better understanding you will have of what your customer’s preferences are. This will allow you to maximize your productivity and appeal to your client’s interests.
Your website copy should focus on what a human would search for. Trying to beat the engine with repetitive keywords will get you nowhere. The engine is smarter than that. Look for phrases and strings that will be searched for by the normal human. Effectively targeting these types of key phrases will garner more hits.
Is your website accessible to people of all abilities? If your website is not easily accessible to disabled users, you might be cutting off a vital demographic. Make sure that your website’s vital information can easily be accessed and processed through text-reading programs for blind users. Deaf users will benefit from transcriptions or closed captioning for video content.
To better optimize your site for search engines, you should place keywords in the title tag for every post. Most search engines place more importance on titles than other types of content. This means that using effective keywords is your title is one of the best ways to draw in traffic from search engines.
It is never a bad idea to add another quality section to your website. When you add content onto your website in whatever form, you make your site more informative to your clients and gain greater search engine visibility. Therefore, you in turn will receive more visitors and you will have more opportunities to catch their attention.
When creating URLs (Uniform Resource Locator), you should use keywords whenever it is possible. Keywords that are found in the URL, hold weight and prove a much-needed search engine boost. Be sure to use a content management system to place keywords and hyphens in your URLs, that will attract visitors.
Make sure your keyword density isn’t too high or too low. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the more times their keyword is mentioned, the higher in the rankings they will go. Doing this actually causes the engines to tag your site as spam and keep it low. Try to aim for using your keyword in no more than 7% of the content on your page.
Whatever you do, avoid using images for your links both within your site and to outside pages. The engines love text and they love sites that have a lot of links. If you are placing your links in images then you are basically hiding them from the crawlers. Avoid it or your ranking will suffer.
As discussed earlier, search engine optimization does not have to be scary or intimidating regardless of how little experience you have with building or maintaining websites. Follow the tips in this article to find ways to optimize your search engine results easily and effectively. You can improve your site’s ranking in search results with just a little effort and education.