Grow Your Business With Targeted SEO Techniques
As you grow to understand the thinking behind SEO, you will begin to figure out what you can do to make changes that are positive to your site. When you are looking to learn how it's done, check out the article below.
Although you may outsource some of the work, SEO is still your primary job as a site owner. This means you will have to oversee the process, as tedious as it may seem at times. You cannot let the little details slip by you. One wrong keyword or a broken link today could lead to a poorly ranked site tomorrow. So be sure to stay on top of things and micromanage your site.
Make sure you didn't forget to leave robots.txt set. In many cases, when a site is in development, web designers will use a robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing the site at all. Some of these same web designers forget to remove the robots.txt file when the site goes live. If you know what date your site is going live, one tip is a create a cron job that deletes the robots.txt file automatically on the designated date.
To keep your website focused on one thing, think about removing what you do not really need. Your goal is to sell a product by giving content about it and about related topics. Anything that seems off topic can be removed. You do not want your audience to be distracted.
How you present keywords is just as important as using them consistently. By adding bold or italic tags, you impart importance to your visitors and draw their attention to them. This also has an impact on the search engines. This simple addition brings weight to searches and drives visitors to act.
If you are trying to increase the visibility of your site all on your own, you are going to need to become a student of search engine optimization. There are several great books that you can read to begin to get introduced to the world of search engine optimization.
Including "breadcrumb" links on your website's pages can improve navigation - and search engine performance, too. "Breadcrumbs" are text links that show visitors their current location in a site's hierarchy, e.g., "home >> products >> boats >> inflatable." Not only will your website visitors appreciate the assistance, search engines will also pick up a few more possible search terms when they index "breadcrumbs".
Know your competition. Every business has its competition, and the best way to stay ahead of them is with knowledge. Check out their websites, and Link building see how yours measures up. It can also be helpful to do keyword searches for the product or service you offer. If your competition is showing higher on the search results page, you can take steps to figure out why.
When you post articles on article directories to get backlinks, keep the quality of the article you are posting foremost in your mind. The reader is not reading the article to see if there might be somebody posting a backlink in it. The reader is trying to find something out, so make sure your article actually addresses question the reader may have!
The decision to consolidate near-duplicate pages, should be carefully considered, in terms of the number and quality of inbound links, as well as, the popularity associated with each separate page. If you consolidate, it is inevitable that at some point, a former site visitor will now have a broken link to the site that was absorbed. Consequently, you must preserve the page that has been more frequently visited and linked.
Optimize your HTML and not just your text. Search engines don't see the pages the same way human users do, so just because it looks good on the outside doesn't mean it'll get ranked highly. For example, using an <h1> tag is a better choice than increasing the font size with the <font> tag, since now the search engine will realize that text is a header.
People sometimes type in your domain name without the www, so ensure that they get somewhere! Either set up your site at the server level to accept both www and non-www links, or create a 301 redirect for one way or the other to point to the correct canonicalization.
Using words like "photo", "image", or "picture" in the ALT text on your IMG tags can help target searchers to your site. People will often search for a keyword plus one of those three words to try to find the graphic they're looking for. Bring them to your site and provide the information!
If you can afford to, try to stay away from shared server hosting. It can be a very unreliable hosting platform that can damage the work you put into helping your SEO. Maybe try sticking to cloud hosting or virtual private server. If you must use shared hosting, do your research to make sure that it has a positive reputation.
For blogs that cover a niche topic, guest-blogging for other sites is a free and highly effective way to increase traffic to both sites through link backs. This also improves both sites' overall link integrity and can make a distinct difference in the amount of relevancy that search engines assign to both sites.
Being on the first page of search results is the ultimate goal. It's not easy to do that, especially when you are competing against similar sites in your market, but the suggestions offered here can give you an advantage over the others and make your site rise in the rankings and show in the top pages.