By Clinton Lagares


Given the pervasiveness of the internet, it only follows that search engine optimization is a topic of vital importance to all businesses. Though the process may seem complex and intricate, this article is meant to provide you with helpful tips and hints to guide you through the process of optimizing your business' search engine results.

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.

Using Google's Adwords Keyword Tool is great to see how many searches are being conducted on a phrase or word, but it also has a bid suggestion which is full of information. The higher the bid, the more lucrative the traffic, and also the more likely other bids are already capitalizing on those words.

If you have recently consolidated pages on your site, you should immediately update your site map to reflect the change. This ensures that the search engines do not determine your site's relevancy score based on dated information. Failure to do so puts your site in jeopardy of losing valuable traffic.

If you must use Flash on your website, boost your search engine rankings by providing an alternative HTML-only option. Not only will the search engine spiders have an easier time crawling and ranking your page, but your human site visitors will appreciate it, as well. The easier your site is to use, the more links people will make to it, which also boosts your search engine ranking.

When you look at competitor's websites for search engine optimization analysis, make sure you examine their site map carefully. A competitor that gets consistent high rankings from the search engines, likely has a very well-optimized site. Inspect the keywords that show up on their site map. Ask yourself if there are any keywords on your competitor's site that your site could use.

Beware! Your search engine optimization process is not complete when your website appears high on the first search results page. You also need to ensure that your website is helpful and informative to the visitors who find it through the search engines. The engines track visitor behavior. A visitor who visits your site and then returns to the results page is a "bounce," and the search engines will count bounces against your relevance.

Within your site's body copy, be sure to indicate heading tabs with the notation H#. Keep them separate from the headings that are used by other pages on your site. It is especially important to use highly relevant, useful words in these headings, which will make it easier for you to distinguish them from the rest of the code.

Please try not to use flash or a giant image as your main page as this can reduce search engine optimization. If you insist on doing so, make sure that you at least place text and navigation links below the fold and try your best to place your keywords in places that will be easily reached. Images cannot be traced by spiders so you need to place text near or around them to make sure they are tracked more easily.

To make your website's linking structure give you good search engine results, avoid deep linking hierarchies, unless you are comfortable with your low-level pages performing poorly on the results pages. Deep linking means using many nested sub-directories to organize your content. Search engines are unlikely to burrow more than two or three sub-directories deep, so make sure pages at that depth are not page that you want to optimize for the search engines.

When utilizing search engine optimization it is important to be patient. It often times takes many months before search engine optimization results are able to be seen. Always remember that the smaller your company is, and the newer your company is to doing business online, the longer it will take to see positive SEO results.

Do not go overboard when it comes to anchor text because having all of your links looking the same will make the search engines believe that it is automated. Mix it up by using the URL to your business sometimes but using the name of your company at other times.

To rank higher in results from a search engine, include links to exterior websites in your content. Make sure you link to websites that don't compete against you, and have content relevant to your site. For instance, you can link to an informational article or to a video.

If you are considering consolidating two or more similar pages, you should first identify the relative quantity and quality of your inbound links. This can be done by using the simple command "link:domain.com/yourpage.html"� from the Google search page. Yahoo Site Explorer offers a similar option for checking specific back links.

Use the most searched keywords in your HTML title tag. Search engines weigh the placement of keywords and the most weight is given to those in the title. Putting the most important words right in your title will get you to the top of a search query and drive users to your site.

Use only published standards to validate your markup or site appearance. You should make every effort to use each and every header tag when possible; and structure your site content so that it is presented clearly and in a logical, hierarchical order. This makes it easier for various search engine services to analyze and rank your site.

Avoid using Flash content to help with SEO because it won't. While it looks great and can be impressive, you are not allowed to link to single pages in a Flash site. For the best results, don't rely completely on Flash. If you want to use it, do so sparingly.

Use these techniques to make sure that your website is ranking well and that people are seeing your website in search engine results. Because you want people to visit your website, or you're just wasting your time. Use SEO to help your site gets noticed, and you'll be able to share your website with everyone.




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