What makes one website rank higher than another? This all depends on how the website is optimized for the search engines. If your website is not in the rank that you desire, it is time for you to learn the techniques of search engine optimization. This article contains some tips to get you started.
Allow visitors to your site to social bookmark it for later, by providing your visitors this option, you are helping create links that will raise you in search engine ranks. Not only that, but you can find free widgets that can help you accomplish this for free. Remember the higher in search results, the easier you can be found and get more traffic.
There are many virtues in the field of Search Engine Optimization, and patience is the biggest one. When trafficking your site, especially if you’re a do-it-yourself businessperson, you have to realize that it takes time to get your business ranked up at the top. Results may take months, but you’ll have to keep working in the meantime.
To bring more visitors to your web site, 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.
To optimize search engine results, never change or retire a page without a 301 redirect. A 404 (page not found) is the absolutely worst case scenario a server can deliver. A 301 redirect tells the search engine the new ULR and transfers that into the search position. Learning how to do a 301 redirect is simple and will keep your search engine results optimal.
Present yourself as an experienced veteran of your field. Being an expert in your field can prove lucrative in marketing your internet business. Build a site that is designed with your buyers’ needs in mind, then implement SEO strategies so that they can locate what you have to offer. Make sure you know exactly what customers are looking for, don’t just guess.
Use descriptive title tags to ensure that all search engines will be able to understand your website’s content. Aim for fewer than 60 characters, since many search engines stop displaying content after that point. The search engines will also give much less weight to any terms after the 60 characters.
Be specific about your keywords and phrases and keep it simple. If you try to catch every keyword in your niche, you will have spread yourself too thin. Target a select few and use them creatively and often while still maintaining a natural flow to your page. By doing this you can push to the top of the list much easier.
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.
Be varied in the page titles of your site, but not too lengthy. Targeting over 70 characters will begin to diminish the weight of the page or site. Keep the titles condensed and intersperse a wide variety of your keywords and phrases amongst them. Each individual page will add its own weight to the overall search.
Submit your site to major search engines. This may seem like it is an obvious step, but many site owners believe that a search engine will link to you if someone searches a certain keyword. While this may be true, you may not be the first on the list, or even on the first page. Optimize this strategy by paying a small fee to the search engine, and get your site on top of the results.
Providing content that can be linked to and referenced by other websites, bloggers, etc., is the simplest way to optimize your standing in search engines. Say for example you are a graphic designer and have a site that operates as your portfolio. If you were to provide unique tutorials on your website, others can discover these, appreciate them and share them on their own site, which in turn increases the amount of times your page is referenced on the whole of the Internet as well as increasing the traffic coming from those pages where your tutorials were referenced.
Stay far away from PDF files. If a website uses PDFs, it is basically taking a very large shortcut. This is a sign of a poorly managed website, and search engines view it as such. You do not want to be sen as lazy and therefore ranked poorly by the search engines, so do not use PDFs.
When making a page redirect use the 301 server redirect as opposed to 302 or meta refreshes. A 301 redirect is telling the search engines that this is a permanent change and that they should update their indexes to the new page. The other types are used frequently by spammers so stay away from them unless they are needed.
Know your competition. Every business has its competition, and the best way to stay ahead of them is with knowledge. Check out their websites, and see how yours measures up. It can also be helpful to do keyword searches for the product or service you offer. If your competition is showing higher on the search results page, you can take steps to figure out why.
Keep your use of robots.txt files to a minimum. These files are useful for keeping areas of your site hidden from the search engines and are perfectly fine to use. The problem comes if too much of your site is hidden behind these files. The engines will consider your site ‘forbidden’ and will stop indexing it all together.
Optimizing your website is not that difficult, once you learn what the search engines like to see. Learn all that you can and put together a plan of action. Monitor your website for any positive movements in rank. If you are proactive and diligent in optimizing your website, before long, you will see positive results.