Taking Your First Steps In Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing your website only requires time and a little guidance. Read on to discover some very useful information on kicking your SEO into high gear.

When designing your site for SEO, make sure to include relevant keywords in the title tag. Since these words will show up as the title to your page, it is the single most important place to put the relevant keywords. However, make sure your title tag is no more than six to seven words in length.


A great way to get people interested in your business is through blogging. You can blog about all sorts of things relevant to your business - industry news, new promotions, up coming new products, etc. You will want to make sure you keep your blog up to date and to post new entries on a regular basis to keep people coming back.

Be true to yourself and true to your readers. If you are putting content on your site that links to a product or service you don't actually believe in, or that just brings you money, savvy people will see that greed and not want to come back to your site. Worse yet they will stop referring others to you.

A popular way to optimize your search engine results is to use Google AdWord's own keyword tool. Using it, you can examine what keywords people are using to search for specific things. With this data, you can then begin adjusting your own keywords to match what other are using, to generate more hits.

Insert a keyword phrase on the URL to your website. Search engines will assign a higher value to your URL when they are determining the sites to spit out on searches. The more popular the keyword phrase of your URL, the higher frequency that your site will appear on searches.

Use Google Maps and similar services to promote your website. When people look for a local business, your name is going to come up. Include a link to your website in the description, to allow visitors to learn more about your services. You should get visits from local people who are potential customers.

To give SEO a great boost, whenever possible use off-site links to quality content. This is crucial in terms of your link usage. Search engines rank relevant off-site links higher than internal ones than just connect the various content of your site. Look for options that offer linking opportunities to go back to your page, so your ranking and your traffic can increase.

You might think that linking to a huge number of other websites will increase the popularity of your site and is a great way to get improved search engine optimization, but remember the quality of the sites you link to is very important. If you link to poor quality sites, it can actually hurt the popularity ranking of your site.

To avoid waiting for Google to add your site to its directory, place a link to your site on higher ranking sites. One easy way to do this is to register at a popular forum and include a link to your site in your signature. When Google scans the forum, they'll see your site and start adding its pages.

To make sure you see a boost in search engine traffic every time someone scrapes content from your site, use only absolute links. An absolute link is a link that contains a protocol, such as "http://". Without that protocol, your links will only be valid on your own site, and you will not be able to benefit from content scrapes.

With millions of sites out there, you cannot afford to wait for the major search engines to seek you out. Take a proactive approach by registering your site with all of them - Google, Bing, Yahoo, and any others that you come across. Waiting for recognition is unlikely to deliver the site traffic that you hope to generate from your efforts.

Always remember to keep your customers in mind when writing blurbs that contain search engine optimization language. This keeps your customers interested in what you have to say and the products and services you have to offer. Remember using only search engine optimization words will make your blurbs sound spammy.

Do not use 301 redirects on a page that no longer exists on your website. Instead, use a 401 Gone error page to indicate the page is well and truly gone from your website. A 301 redirect should only be used if the content has actually been moved to another page.

There is an art to doing SEO for everyone. There is no "end all" solution that works for every site on the Internet. You also cannot instantly optimize your content, you can only improve its guidelines. Beware of scams that promise to help you get #1 rankings on search engines in no time because they never work.

Having read the advice in this article, there are probably some things that need modification or checking on your website. Improve your website by utilizing the tips you have just read.