Practical Solutions To Your Search Engine Optimization Woes

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.

When setting up SEO on your site, avoid duplicating content on various pages within your site. Instead of making your site seem larger and more relevant to search engines, you will be penalized for duplication. Instead, try to have individualized content on each section of your site that is highly relevant to the target keywords.

Frequent updates are a powerful tool in the ongoing effort to optimize a website for search engines. It is tempting to view search engine optimization as a one-time treatment for a business website, but in fact it is an ongoing process. Adding fresh content to a website - content that contains the same keywords as the rest of the site - can leverage the site's position on search engine results pages.

Make sure to put lots of keywords throughout your site. The title and the page headers are by far the two most important spots to put these tags. Make sure they are appropriate and fitting to the site, but use lots of descriptive words people might use when trying to find what you have available.

Pictures and graphics are great for the visual aspect of your web page. Unfortunately, search engines cannot interpret them (unless a user is doing a specific image search). If you have an awesome image, make sure you have an awesome, descriptive text caption to go with it. If you are familiar with HTML, use an "ALT" tag for this: it will allow you to write a lengthy description that you can fill with search-engine-friendly keywords.

Include a transcript for closed captions with your online videos to help drive more traffic to your site. The major search engines will scan these transcripts for keywords, so adding them to your videos will help bring you more traffic.

One important tip that you should remember is that you should never republish an article at different links on your site. Google ranks pages in its SERP based on quality and considers different links to articles with similar content as a low quality link. Instead, use references to one single link.

Use a search engine to your advantage. Find the top ten best rated and most used article directories, and start out by only submitting to those. This will help you keep your focus, and also put you higher on the submission lists for the search engines. You should only associate with reputable companies.

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.

When dealing with search engine optimization it is extremely important to use your keywords or keyword phrases in the body of your web page, be it blog or otherwise. Try and use your keywords a few times in the beginning of each page to attract readers/users and keep their interest.

Try to get your page link on a .edu or .gov site for better search engine optimization. Because these sites are top-level domains and are considered to be very credible and reliable, people who see your link on a .edu or .gov will think you are legitimate and credible as well.

When first establishing your site you should link to a site that is already established as reputable by Google. Applying through Goggle's normal submission process can take a very long time. Linking to an already recognized site is a great way to move your site onto the results page and start getting traffic right away.

Keep your SEO skills and knowledge up-to-date. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing, so you need to stay on top of the latest developments. SEO techniques that you learned three years ago may no longer be effective, and you could waste valuable time and money trying to optimize a website with outdated SEO methods.

Catalog all the changes you're making to your site to track how your SEO is doing. Keep a log in a Notepad file or Word, listing the changes you made and the date you changed it on. That way you can compare it to your statistics and see if your changes were good or harmful to your audience.

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.