Optimize Your SEO Initiatives With These Straightforward Tips

Content written by-Stout Eason

Search engine optimization is often explained in complex terminology when it is simply a way of increasing your website's chances of ranking highly by manipulating your web content to include the words that your target audience might use to find your website. This article seeks to simplify the explanations so that search engine optimization becomes less intimidating.

If your site has a defined set of categories, optimize the URLs on your site to contain the keywords associated with the categories. Say you have two categories, cats and dogs. Google likes it better if the URLs for such a site are mysite.com/cats and mysite.com/dogs as opposed to something like mysite.com?category=1. Even more importantly, people searching for a keyword associated with one of the categories are more likely to arrive at one of your subpages when you use a logical URL structure.

If you are looking to get a better handle on what keywords and phrases to use in SEO, first you have to know which phrases people actually use. Google maintains an AdWords program that will allow you to do this. You enter specific words and phrases, and AdWords will return how many times people have conducted searches for those specific words and phrases.

When coding a site to optimize its search engine presence, keep your CSS and JavaScript files in an external folder. This helps de-clutter the source code for the individual pages, making the pages smaller and easier to manage. It also ensures that any errors in your CSS code won't interfere with the search engine's ability to index your pages.

Build an exceptional website. Before you do any SEO to get your website onto the first page of search results, ask yourself honestly whether your website really is one of the best 5 websites in the world on your chosen topic. If you can't answer that question positively with confidence, then work on improving your website.

Don't use hidden text or links on your website to optimize your site for search engines. Some webmasters will try to make text or links invisible to visitors but visible to search engine spiders. One way they do this is to use white text on a white background. Search engines can now easily spot this sort of behavior, so it will not help your site rank at all.

Use Youtube! Video hits are easily searched for on a video site like Youtube, and you can even embed links to take the viewers back to your website. If you title the video with your keywords and embed it on your website, it will help to bring your ratings up in other search engines.

A great way to increase search engine optimization is to use your keywords or keyword phrases in any images you have on your page. Many people are directed to pages via image searches on different search engines. Make sure that all images on your page have popular keywords that will direct traffic to your page.

Anyone who is new to the world of search engine optimization should begin using available online research tools to identify the most useful keywords for the particular type of content for which increased visitor traffic is needed. By doing so, it will be possible to learn roughly how often searches are performed using potential combinations of words and phrases, helping narrow list of effective choices for any given topic.

Keep your HTML title tags free of "stop words" to ensure the tags are properly indexed by search engines. Some search engines eliminate common words like a, an, the, and, but, in, on, he, she and other similar words to increase the relevant links and improve on the speed with which results are returned. Keeping these words from title tags that receive the most weight in Search Engine Optimization ensures your site is properly indexed.

When using Twitter, employ a URL shortener that utilizes a 301 redirect to ensure you're getting the full benefits of the inbound link. bit.ly provides great statistics in addition to using the 301 redirect, and therefore is an excellent choice. You can keep track of the click-through numbers on each link that you shorten.

How To Improve Search Engine Optimization

If you have a competitor whose SEO performance you would like to emulate, find out how many visitors the competitor's site draws from the search engine results pages. If you intend to combat the competitor head-to-head, this gives you a goal for your own efforts. If you simply want to keep pace with the pack, you can use the competitor's traffic as a yardstick

The W3C says, "Cool URLs don't change." Avoid like https://www.searchenginejournal.com/content-optimization/ , changing the page names on your site or you'll lose their page rank along with it. If you do have to change the page name, set up a 301 redirect to point to the new location. But really, just don't do seo company !

When you're thinking of getting inbound links, don't forget about locations outside of a website. Twitter, Facebook, and even email are great places to convince people to link to you. Twitter and Facebook are very important as people tend to trust what their friends post even more than an expert website.

If you can afford to, try to stay away from shared server hosting. It can be a very unreliable hosting platform that can damage the work you put into helping your SEO. Maybe try sticking to cloud hosting or virtual private server. If you must use shared hosting, do your research to make sure that it has a positive reputation.

You should do your best to make it very simple for all the visitors to your site to add it to their social bookmarks. These types of links are one of the kinds that are valued most by many of the different searches engines that are available.

Keywords are a huge focus when it comes to search engine optimization. Not only should your links use the keyword anchor text, but the text around those links should also be related to your keywords. This means that you will try to surround the link with descriptive text that will help the spiders locate the quality content that you are trying to share.

Change your anchor text. Don't use the same anchor text on your inbound links, because the search engines may recognize them as automated, which could affect your rankings. Change text slightly, using relevant keywords and phrases, so that you have a variety of different links that all lead to your website.

As you can see, search engine optimization is an excellent way to advertise your business. Your web presence will benefit considerably from a few simple tweaks to the way you present your business. These simple tips are just the beginning of the great things that search engine optimization can do for you.