The proliferation of online retailers and businesses has made it easier than ever to reach a world of prospective consumers. However, it has also made it somewhat more difficult to differentiate one's site from the rest. Search engine optimization, or SEO, makes sites more visible to major search engines. Here are some tips for optimizing your site.
Make sure to have a relevant title and meta description on each page of your site. Without a unique page title, it is very difficult to rank highly in the listings. The meta tag isn't required for high search rankings; however, it does usually show below your listing in the results so it is useful for encouraging click through.
Keep an eye on where your site stands in the search engine results. By knowing this, you will be able to tell if any efforts at raising your ranking are working at all. You can also use your referrer log to see how your visitors are arriving to your site and what search terms they are using.
Submit your site! Many website owners overlook this simple method. Go to the search providers you know and trust, and submit your site to them. Doing this can give you the jump-start you need to start moving to a higher volume of readers. Don't forget to submit to search directories as well.
Keep your content fresh. While having lots of content is important, it has to be up to date. A search engine will track how frequently your site is updated and this has an effect on your rank in the freshness category. Any form of change, whether it's a news article or a blog post, will help to boost your rank.
Develop a free calculator, e-book or other electronic product to give away on your website. Be sure it features your website address and business name so people can come back for related products. Post links to the free product on forums related to your field to drive more traffic to your website.
Find free tools to help you submit. Several websites offer automated submission tools, that help you submit to up to hundreds of article directory sites in a short amount of time. Search very hard to find the free tools that do this. Most sites charge a fee for this task, but if you are lucky you will find those that do not.
Add your primary keyword phrase into the first paragraph of content. If you can add it twice, that will be even better. Make sure though that your content is still readable and user friendly and avoid making it come across as spam. If you can fit it in and still keep a good content flow then do it.
Search engines hate frames, 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.
Making use of HTML header tags can help optimize a page's search engine ranking. While the lower levels of header tags are unrestricted, a page can only have one header assigned to the top (H1) level. This is typically reserved for the page's title. Including multiple H1 tags will break a page's HTML and render other SEO efforts pointless.
To get better traffic from your site's RSS feed, use keywords there just like you would on your own page. This will help users to find your feed through search engine, which will lead to more visitors for your site. The best places to insert keywords are your feed's title and description.
Create a series of email auto-responders for customers who sign up for your mailing list. Offer a tip a day or a relevant series of articles and have them set to go over a set amount of time. Include both content and a sales pitch in your emails to help convert potential prospects into paying customers.
Try improving your Google crawl rate. The Google crawl rate refers to how often a search spider from Google visits your website and gathers information that will then become available in search results. Post new content regularly to attract attention from search engine spiders. There are many traffic tools that help you keep track of how often spiders visit your website.
Don't be afraid to use your keywords more if the language sounds natural. While search engines will penalize your site if it appears you are keyword-stuffing, if you can read your content out loud and it sounds normal and natural, you are unlikely to trip that penalty. Search engines try to remove spam, not sites with many incidences of a single word or phrase.
The fully optimized site takes advantage of search engines' algorithms and relevancy score determinations to secure more favorable positioning on search results pages. By following the advice found in this article, your company can use SEO to generate significant increases in site traffic from search pages and even from other sites.
