Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical when trying to generate traffic to your website. The websites that show up on page one of a Google search will get a lot more hits or traffic then those on the next page. Whether you’re a business owner, a personal blog owner, or just someone with a profession in art that wants to show off your work, optimizing your site to perform well in search rankings, may just be essential to your success. Read the tips below to help you make the most of your efforts:
Always use SEO-friendly URLs for your websites. If you use keywords in your URLs then your website will show up in a higher position in search results. Remember, hyphens in URLs are treated as spaces, but underscores or not, so for search engine purposes it is preferable to use hyphens in URLs and file names.
In order for search engine robots to crawl your website easily it is important that you use flash sparingly. Do not use it when making menus or for adding text. The best way to use flash is for videos, sound and animation. While search engines can index flash, it is not done very efficiently and this is a lost opportunity for you. The easier the robots can crawl your site, the better the result will be.
In the last year or two, social media signals play a big part in Search Engine Optimization of Dallas websites.
Keep the content as your base. The more content you have on your website, the more readers you will gain. No one likes to click on a site and be bombarded with links and advertisements. If you keep your own content front and center, readers will feel much more comfortable on your page and will likely keep coming back for more.
With SEO, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. If you try something and it doesn’t work, you can always come back later and make changes. One of the most important things is to keep putting out new content and keep your pages fresh, so even mistakes will have a positive impact on your search engine rankings, as long as you take care of errors as soon as you notice them.
Visit the websites of your competitors. Do internet searches for the keywords that are related to your personal business to find other sites that are related. It is a great way to get fresh ideas for your site and to learn what it is that your competitors are doing to have a successful site.
Hire a writer if need be. Some people do not have either the skill or the time to provide daily updates and quality content. If this is the case with you, look at hiring an online article writer to keep your site busy and fresh. Adding new information gives you a heads up over the competition.
Every anchor link on a website that leads to an external site should be validated regularly. Links that point to missing content (broken links) are bad news. Not only are broken links annoying to website visitors, they are penalized by search engine indexing algorithms. Fixing or deleting broken links improves a website’s position on the search engine results pages.
Search engines hate frames (iframes), so if you need to use them make sure to include a noframes tag and to create a full version of your site for the noframes client. If the search engines spiders can’t read your site then you are never going to move anywhere in the ranks. Creating a noframes site will ensure that you can even be indexed in the search engine.
Linking over and over again to and from the same site is considering link spamming and you want to avoid it. Rarely will you ever put more than two links to the same site. Similarly with keywords, don’t over use the same ones, and don’t stuff keywords on your web pages. Your site will look like a spammer to the engines and will create the impression that you are paying for links. Even if the engines don’t flag your site as spam, they will only include the first link or two in their ranking system.
When considering a professional or company to help you with your SEO efforts, be skeptical of claims that seem too good to be true. No one will be able to guarantee you the top slot on a major search engine, as this slot changes often. Unless you submit a paid advertisement, there is no way to get your site listed any higher than the rank given by the search engine spiders.
One of the most efficient ways to attract back links from other reputable sites is to set up a series of RSS feeds on your site. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, allows visitors to directly stream the latest and greatest information to your site regularly and without actually visiting the site.
Search engines give sites that regularly update with fresh content better rankings than sites which do not update or update infrequently. To get on the top of search engines, it’s important to always have new content related to your site with lots of the same key words used throughout your site.
Offer great products. If your products are great and being used, people will give you links without having to ask. They will link to you of their own accord, and therefore the search engines will be more likely to rank you higher since people are finding and visiting your site.
Now, are you ready to get to work, so that you can get some results? Once you see a surge in your traffic – due to a few well placed keywords — you will be glad you invested the time necessary to do search engine optimization. Apply the tips above to make your efforts a success!