Many people don’t know where to begin when trying to optimize their website for search engines, and without knowing the factors valued by search engine algorithms, you could end up wasting a lot of resources. This article contains some tips to help make your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign successful.

Maintaining a healthy presence online means always keeping your website or forums up to date with current affairs. Even if your main selling point is not any sort of news angle, it is a good idea to show that you are constantly upgrading your site and put full attention into your business and customers.

Only use URL parameters to generate dynamic pages when absolutely necessary. If a search engine sees a URL like mysite.com?param1=3812¶m2=sjhwefjo, it will assume that there are an infinite number of possibilities for this URL and not bother indexing them. Using parameters for transaction-specific data that a search engine wouldn’t care about is fine, though.

Use alt tags for images and span element titles to your advantage. Search engines look at a site’s code, not what is actually visible to a user, so if your keyword is “cat” and there is a picture of a calico cat on your site, using an alt tag of “a calico cat” for the image will expose the search engine to your keyword even if the user never sees it. The title of a span element works in the same way.

Make sure that all the pages on your website load quickly. New search engine algorithms now take into consideration page response times when assigning a rank to your website. If your pages take a long time to load it could be due to your web host rather than your content. It is best to use a dedicated web server to host your website.

Consider search engine optimization as a way to make your way to internet marketing success. Search engine optimization uses search engine algorithms to your advantage and boosts your website’s page rankings through custom content. This means your website will have greater exposure and you’ll reap the benefits of increased traffic.

Try to keep flash and frames to a minimum on your site. They may look pretty, but they are horrible for search engine optimization and engines can’t decode them easily. If you have to use flash, make sure to also include links or keywords on the bottom of your pages.

Using a specific keyword too often will actually count against you if you are trying to maximize the frequency of search hits. Search engines will be looking for keywords that are inserted in natural language. Therefore, you will have to not only use your keyword frequently, but the content must make sense.

To rank higher in search results, you should use an index page or a home page that you can link to. Your content is going to vary and be updated: a page might not interest people for very long. You can however rise steadily in search results by referring constantly to the same index page.

While having relevant and popular keywords is key for proper search engine optimization, it is very important not to stuff your pages with keywords. Search engines take note of pages that are overly stuffed with keywords as a means to get higher search result rankings and penalize them accordingly. Make sure your page does not fall into this category.

Hopefully the tips above have given you some SEO techniques that you can implement immediately to get your website a higher search engine results page (SERP) rank. Or, perhaps the tips have helped you to decide that SEO is not for you and that you need to hire a professional SEO company instead.

There are so many websites all over the internet that nobody has ever seen before and that is because the webmaster did not apply any good search engine optimization techniques to his site. If you have a site that you would like to boost the rankings of, follow this advice!

SEO is not a one-time thing, so you always need to work maintenance on your blog or website. Check constantly for broken links, images that won’t load, and videos that have been removed from the host source and other broken paths on your pages. Search engines penalize sites that display broken links, so stay diligent here.

To search engine optimize your website, avoid using navigation menus that utilize JavaScript, forms or CSS. These types of navigation menus can’t be crawled by search engine spiders. If you must use one of these types of navigation menus, be sure to duplicate your site navigation, as normal hyperlinks, in the footer of each page.

Carry out a search using Google for site:www.yourdomain.com. By doing this you will be able to see which pages of your website are being indexed and if those pages are being presented in a way which would cause searchers to visit your site. You can then do search engine optimization on the pages of your website which aren’t indexed.

If your page is undergoing a search engine optimization makeover, you will probably try to include your keywords more often in your text. However, you must keep your text natural and readable. If the inclusion of keywords interrupts your writing style, it makes the site’s text look unprofessional. Take your time and be creative when you increase the number of keywords in the site’s content.

Be aware that search spiders cannot read images, they can only read text. You need to include text in the descriptions of your images and image tags so that they can be found in search engine results. Using the image’s “ALT” tag, you can add keywords and text, that can help the spider effectively find your image by reading around it.

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.

Stay away from search engines that ask you to pay to be involved. There are hundreds of search engines that will list your site for free, some without even having to submit your details. Any site that charges for a simple listing is not only unethical, but likely an ineffective site.

One of the biggest mistakes budding SEO experts make is having titles on their site that are just too long. Keep in mind that most search engines put a 60 character cap on keywords for a title, so the shorter, more informative you can make your title, the better off you will be.

Make sure you’re using analytics on your website. Analytics allow you to measure the traffic to your site. It’ll tell you where people are located, the browser they’re using, how long they spend on the site, what they visit, and how they found the site. You can use this information to figure out what’s drawing people to your website and allow you to use that to increase your traffic.

Do not allow your site to sit idly by as other webmasters take the viewers that you have worked so hard to supply a great site for. If you take the tips and advice that were included in this article, you are sure to boost your rankings and draw in some of those viewers to your site.

Article writing is now a major weapon in search engine optimization. If you have read Part I of this article you will see why previous linking strategies are failing miserably. As the major search engine, Google now expects links in order to increase your site ranking to be:

1 Relevant
2 Varying Anchor Text
3 One Way Links

These rules display that more of a natural linking strategy need to be evolved.

Writing expert articles about the content of your website helps to achieve the three objectives above.

First of all, you are able to place links within the resource box of your article pointing back to your website. Some article directories even allow you to place links within the article body itself. Therefore any link text that points back to your website is highly relevant to the article content itself, and your sire.

It is possible to vary the anchor text from article to article while still keeping it keyword orientated and most importantly, relevant.

By submitting your article to article submission sites, you are not committed to place a reciprocal link back to the article site on your website. This ensures that the link to your website is one way.

By writing many quality articles, you will start to be recognized as an expert in your field.

You can see how writing articles about the subject of your website can be a master SEO tool. However, things get even better.

Ezine authors and webmasters also regularly scour these sites for fresh content for their ezines and websites. Your article is free to be distributed and republished as long as it remains intact, with the resource box and all links live.

What this means is that each article can potentially create hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your website, each of them relevant, varying in anchor text and one way. Not bad for about 30 minutes work. So the advice is simple – get writing, or if you feel unable to write your own articles, get someone to write them for you!

Since search engines were invented, there has been a constant head to head between the search engine algorithm writers and webmasters. Every time the algorithms changed the webmasters tried to outwit them. The internet is full if conflicting SEO advice on how to achieve top rankings. This article hopes to clear up some of the confusion.

In the beginning it was sufficient to have an adequate amount of keywords on your website in order to rank highly in the search engines. This led to keyword spamming, a practice which still continues today amongst inexperienced webmasters.

Then along came Google and the goal posts shifted. Google put more emphasis on webpage linking, Their thought was simple – if one website had a link to another website, then it was as if the first website was placing a vote of confidence for the second website’s content and therefore the second website must be useful and relevant to the readers of the first website. Thus the Google Page Rank was invented.

Soon the webmasters and internet marketers got to work. This saw the emergence of link forms and reciprocal linking sites. Internet marketers declared that the more links that appeared on your site, the higher it would rank in Google. Suddenly link pages from websites started to run into multiple pages as the race was on to exchange links with whoever would agree. Some sites started to have thousands of links point to their sites and began rising in the search engine rankings.

Of course the game of cat and mouse with Google continued as the search engine giant once again changed its algorithms.

It is now widely accepted that previous linking strategies are failing because of what Google now expects from links.

RELEVANCY

Google expects links on a site to be relevant to the readers of the original site.

ONE WAY LINKS

Google gives a much higher priority to one-way links without a reciprocal link in return.

ANCHOR TEXT

It is better for the anchor text (the actual text that contains the link) to be keyword relevant to the content and also to vary as numerous instances of the same anchor text without variance can be interpreted as keyword spamming.

The importance placed on the above factors has all but eliminated the effectiveness of previous linking strategies. Most links on link page directories were exchanged with any site who would reciprocate. Therefore most of these sites were not relevant to the original site.

The reciprocal linking strategy also negates the one-way linking preferred by Google. Most link directories contain the same anchor text in all links, as this anchor text was advertised on the “link to us” page.

Therefore Google now looks upon these reciprocal link directories as having no value. They do not distribute page rank and therefore do not help the ranking of your website.

That is why I now describe article writing as the new SEO Master Tool – please see Part II of this article for the reasoning.