Optimizing Your Site So The Search Engines Can Find It
If you own a business website, you may have heard the term search engine optimization, or SEO, being thrown around. Search engine optimization is an essential set of techniques for maximizing your product’s visibility on the internet. Read on to find out how to optimize your website and get more customers.
In order to improve your search engine optimization, use as much natural language as possible. Don’t pack your text full of keywords as search engines will count this against you, knowing it has been a trick to boost search rankings in the past. Instead, use carefully chosen keywords sparsely throughout your text.
Search engines crawl your entire site by default so you should include a robots.txt file to exclude pages that are not relevant to your site topic. Write the file and upload it to the root directory of the site. This will tell the search engine what to ignore right away so it doesn’t waste time going through info that is not important.
To make sure every page of your site is indexed by search engines, do not use Flash in the site’s design. Flash does not allow individual pages to be linked to, which means that search engines can’t crawl them. A separate link for each page will allow all your content to be indexed and found through search engines.
Use keywords throughout your site to maximize your visibility to search engines. Be sure to choose appropriate and popular keywords that are commonly searched by people looking for information about your products and services. The two most important places to include keywords are the title tag and the page header.
It is integral for you to improve the functionality for your customers on your website. To do this, you can include a search box in the top right-hand corner of your page. This gives your visitors the ability to find exactly what they want with one click of the mouse.
Use Javascript if you want, but some crawlers won’t see it. It’s your choice, of course, but just know that not all search engines will find your site easy to crawl.
Image links rarely play a role in search engine optimization. Image links don’t have any anchor text, which means all a search engine has to work with is the link’s URL.
In order to generate more hits from search engines, try using longer or plural forms of your keywords. Stemming keywords is common practice with search engines. If you chose a search term like “accountant” for your keyword, your site may not be included in search results relating to “accountants.” Using the longest version of any keyword result will return all the shorter results.
To ensure that you choose a search engine optimizer that will provide solid results for your website, ask to see examples of his or her work for previous clients. You can also ask for success stories or references from other satisfied customers, especially those in the same industry as your business.
A search engine should be thought of as a machine. Just like a machine, there are many different things one can do to optimize the performance one receives out of it. By knowing the most one possibly can about their machine or search engine they can proceed to optimize its performance.
When optimizing your site, think of the search engine as a matchmaker. The search algorithms look for sites with the most similarities to or cohesion with the most popular and reputable sites. In terms of quality and links, how well does your site content align with that of sites that are considered successful?
When optimizing the images on your website, be sure to use the word “image”, “picture”, or “photo” along with a description. Many users search for images using a keyword plus one of those image-related words. Including both in your image description can help ensure they end up on your site.
As you can see, search engine optimization has a lot of steps, and each of them is important for bringing your website to the forefront of the internet. Now that you know some ways to optimize your website for search engines, you’re ready to get more customers and generate higher profits!
