The proliferation of online retailers and businesses has made it easier than ever to reach a world of prospective consumers. However, it has also made it somewhat more difficult to differentiate one’s site from the rest. Search engine optimization, or SEO, makes sites more visible to major search engines. Here are some tips for optimizing your site.
When optimizing your site for keyword phrases, rather than single words, pay attention to keyword proximity. It is best if your keywords appear together, rather than being separated by other terms. This method increases the weight given to searches for that phrase, without detracting from searches for the individual terms.
Although you may outsource some of the work, SEO is still your primary job as a site owner. This means you will have to oversee the process, as tedious as it may seem at times. You cannot let the little details slip by you. One wrong keyword or a broken link today could lead to a poorly ranked site tomorrow. So be sure to stay on top of things and micromanage your site.
As you begin to learn about SEO, you will run across terms like frames. Frames can be an attractive feature for your site, but they also cause your site to load very slowly and will make the spiders have to work extra hard to crawl your pages. If you do have frames on your site, make sure you also have a few pages offering “noframes” content.
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.
To optimize your website for search engines, always use a unique internet protocol address. When your website shares an IP address with another website, if that other website breaks the terms and conditions of a search engine and is de-indexed from search results, all of your website’s pages will also be de-indexed.
If you choose to hire SEO experts to improve your website you must question them carefully on how they get results. The term “black hat” applies to anyone that intentionally does shady things to increase SERPS. This may help a website out for awhile, but it can also get you punished and your rankings will suddenly drop. Once that happens it takes a lot of effort, time and money to fix.
Keywords are the backbone of search engine optimization. Keywords, when written, should be italicized, underlined, and bold when possible. Check into the backlinks of those you consider competitors. Copy their backlinks creatively. You need backlinks pointing at your site as much as possible. Get backlinks from sites that have the same theme as yours.
It should go without saying that one of the keys to search engine optimization is to promote your website. Make great use of all the social networking tools at your disposal and don’t forget to set up a newsletter and RSS feeds to give your visitors new reasons to keep coming back for more.
Though it is possible to maintain a websites rank in the market when you change a sites content, complete niche change is not recommended. Especially if your good rank has been caused by past link exchange activities. When you completely change your site you may cause those links to error and null your previous ranking.
Don’t let your websites URLs look like this: http://exampledomain.com/?session_id=37. These URLs come from session ID or dynamic addressing. While such systems can help you organize complex websites, note that the URLs they generate don’t say anything about the pages they reference. Permanent, descriptive URLs are another place you can include keywords for search engines to pick up when they index your site.
Links from outside pages to your site will help make your site more legitimate to the engines. Ask your readers or friends to link to you from their sites. It helps if they can mention your particular keywords in the link so try providing them the HTML to link to so that you can control what it says.
Never stop trying to get more inbound links for your site. If you only make an effort to get inbound links once, you will see a momentary boost in your rankings but it won’t last. Having links coming in over time gives you higher credibility and improves your standing.
One key component of proper search engine optimization is to create a sitemap that contains links to every page of your website. This allows search engine spiders to easily navigate your site, often resulting in more of your pages getting indexed. Not only that, but a well designed sitemap can help your visitors quickly find the information that they need.
You should use proper anchor text when you are setting up the interlinks for your site. You need to steer clear of particular words, since they won’t help the optimization effort. SEO specialists can assist you with knowing what anchor text should be used.
The breadcrumb link trail for your webpages – the hierarchical line that shows where a particular page is located (i.e. main>>sales>>bags>>Brand) – can be incorporated into the page’s listing on the search engine results pages. You will need to learn the latest coding methods, like RDFa and micro-data, to make these breadcrumbs appear. It can be worth it to add such functionality to your search engine listings.
Ask your regular readers to sign up for your RSS feed. This will definitely increase SEO ranking since the amount of subscribers your RSS feed receives is taken into consideration. You can even offer them incentives that they will only be eligible for once they sign up for it.
The fully optimized site takes advantage of search engines’ algorithms and relevancy score determinations to secure more favorable positioning on search results pages. By following the advice found in this article, your company can use SEO to generate significant increases in site traffic from search pages and even from other sites.
