Thursday, January 16, 2014

How To Optimize Your Website's Search Engine Performance

By Arianna Dyer


As more and more competitors and rivals enter into the world of online commerce, it becomes increasingly difficult to win the attention of prospective customers. If your business is to succeed online, you must first master the art of search engine optimization, or SEO. Use these tips and tricks to create a competitive edge online.

When setting up a page for SEO, avoid the temptation to set up text or links specifically to manipulate search engines. For example, text that is the same color as the page background, text that is invisibly tiny, or links that are only a few pixels wide, will set off alarms at the search engine. These "black hat" methods can get your site banned entirely from the listings.

There are limits to what a webmaster should do to optimize search engine indexing. Some strategies for SEO can be pushed too far, resulting in spam-like, content-free web pages. Not only are these kinds of pages not appreciated by visitors, search engines will discount them in results rankings and can even drop a website, entirely, if it appears to use unethical SEO tactics.

Optimize your site using breadcrumb navigation. Breadcrumb navigation means including a series of links that lead the viewer incrementally back to the homepage of your site. These make it easier for visitors to find their way around your site and increase the incidence of your target keywords, plus the search engine spiders can index your site more easily. Do you want to rank more highly with the search engines? An efficient search engine optimization strategy is to use the ALT text feature, with any image that you place on your site. This will allow you to place your keywords in as many positions as possible and one extra, can be the ALT text area of an image.

Older blogs and websites will automatically gain higher places on a search engine's ranking list. The older the blog or site, the higher it will be. Search engines take age into consideration because the older a site is, the more likely it is to have an already established customer set.

In order to obtain the actual search volume for your keywords, you may want to consider opening a pay per click account. The account will cost you, but it may be worth it to see the real search volume data for your keywords, to be able to monitor trends, and also to view the impact when you modify or change your keywords. To better manage your search engine optimization, a pay per click account is a definite must.

Having relevant, keyword oriented page titles is one of the best SEO strategies. By choosing titles that accurately describe your page you are better able to inform human searchers and web crawlers about the content of your site. This will naturally boost your traffic as people are better able to find your site when they search for your particular niche.

Remember, there just as many ways that search engine optimization can go wrong as there are ways that can tremendously help a website. The previous tips should help you prevent your website being blocked from search engines as well as improve on the size of your audience.




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