It's tough to find a great job in this economy even for workers with a lot of skill. That's why so many people are deciding to start opening web businesses. Whether you're creating your own website, becoming an affiliate or even blogging for bucks, you will need to understand SEO in order to achieve high rankings. Here's some info on how you can make it.
Set up your website for maximum search engine ranking by using relevant keywords in the URL. Search engines place a fair amount of weight on the terms used in the URL, as long as those keywords also appear elsewhere on your page. Even if you cannot control the domain name used for your site, the names of your pages should be up to you.
Give each page its own title tag. This way, search engines won't think every page is the same and fail to index it properly. Not to mention that it becomes easier for the reader to tell the differences between the pages as well. Something as simple as titling your individual pages can push up your ranking in the SERPs.
When dealing with SEO, it is important to remember to take your time. You can't expect to see results over night, it will take a while to build your reputation in the eyes of the search engines. Also, Google can tell if you try to artificially create links or rapidly increase your traffic and will penalize your site.
If your site has a defined set of categories, optimize the URLs on your site to contain the keywords associated with the categories. Say you have two categories, cats and dogs. Google likes it better if the URLs for such a site are mysite.com/cats and mysite.com/dogs as opposed to something like mysite.com?category=1. Even more importantly, people searching for a keyword associated with one of the categories are more likely to arrive at one of your subpages when you use a logical URL structure.
Before venturing into the world of optimizing your search engine results, it can be beneficial to learn the lingo. Many terms such as HTML and SERP will come up regularly, and understanding them can be a huge benefit as you grow your page hits. There are many books and websites to help you learn the lingo fast.
Study the demographics of your intended audience, and find out where they search. If your intended readers tend to use one search engine over another, it may be best to focus on getting the attention of that search engine over others. Not only to you need to consider the search engines themselves, it is also greatly helpful if you are optimizing for the people looking for information in your niche.
There are many places you can include keywords to optimize a page's search engine performance: No place is more important than the title of the page. While all keyword mentions are taken into account, keywords in the title are heavily weighted. A quick research trip will show you that few pages make it to the top of the search results without having relevant search terms right in their titles.
Having a blog will keep your website new and fresh and will help your ranking with search engines. Search engines crawl through websites to find new, updated content. Blogs that get crawled more frequently have more authority and a higher ranking. If you blog, you are ensuring you will constantly have new content.
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.
One trick you can utilize to make your website rank higher in search engines is choose a keyword phrase which is popular, but not the most popular one. Since the most popular keyword phrases are highly desirable, they create a high level of competition and your site might end up on the bottom of page 45 of search engines. By choosing a phrase which is popular, but not super popular, you will get more page views when you're on the first few pages of the search engines.
When you build your web site make sure that you do not use Flash for that. This is because many search engine crawlers do not understand Flash. Using HTML is the most popular option and it is the easiest to keep up with. Also remember to keep all of the flashy graphics to a minimum.
Any type of site or blog you're building needs to be optimized so that a search engine can crawl it with its search spiders, grab it, and lift it up in the ranking system. The tips contained within this article shed some light on how you can do that, but now it's up to you to actually get busy doing it.