Solid Advice For An Effective SEO Process1454134322425133131523334532155454234513544351434242255324441211353442341154155312421434155553115312

Search engine optimization is the way to go in making sure your website gets picked up by Google, Yahoo and Bing. It takes more than just sprinkling in keywords though, as SEO is both a science and art form. Keep reading this article to learn some tips and tricks that can help you refine your SEO practice. When you are deciding what phrases to use throughout your site, use this quick Google test to see if your page has a chance of being a "top result." Search each of your potential key-phrases (in quotation marks) individually. Choose the key-phrase that retrieves the least amount of results. This way, you will have less competition within your search result pool. When you are first starting a website, avoid using sub-domains. Google treats sub-domains as their own site for purposes of assigning them PageRank. Directories from the main site, however, have the same PageRank as the parent site. This means, for instance, that mysite.com/store will have the same PageRank as mysite.com, but followers store.mysite.com won't.  Don't just go with major search engines. There are many other link sites that are set up that have very specific directories. These can be used to your advantage because they target a specialized audience. Find the link sites that target your intended audience and go for it. These sites are there to optimize your customer base. Test your third party resources before you use them, and ask others who have, how they performed. You do not want to find yourself relying on a search optimizing tool that is completely inaccurate or faulty. Ask around, try them out, and make the best choice for what you need. If you want searchers to find you, you need to be consistently providing them with content - high-quality substance rich in the keywords they are looking for. This sounds elementary, if you are not regularly providing content to your blog or site, and if it does not contain the keywords you want your audience to find, you simply won't get found in searches. 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. When crafting your website to maximize traffic through keyword searches, it is important to be as direct, relevant, and specific as possible. Achieving a high search engine rank with a broad term such as "baked goods," for example, is likely to be much more difficult than doing so with a keyword phrase like "three-layer fudge caramel cake." Selecting keywords with clarity and precision will help you rise above the search engine competition. Building backlinks is a good SEO technique, but avoid linking to bad neighborhoods. The number of backlinks your site has usually positively effects your site's search engine results page rank, however any backlinks from bad neighborhoods can make your site guilty by association causing search engines to penalize your website. It is best to avoid adult sites, gambling sites and free-for-all link farms when building backlinks. Focus your page on a keyword phrase, not your entire site. Try to have each page centered on a particular keyword and keyword phrase. Your site will rank higher if you go this route as trying to build an entire site around a single keyword ends up reading as a spam site. One of the more subtle efforts webmasters can make to optimize their sites for search engine performance is naming all of their image files descriptively. If search engines index image directories they are wasting their time if all of the pictures have generic titles. (e.g. "img_HSC_001.jpg") Images with names like "louis-vuitton-bag-03.jpg," on the other hand, traffic contain keywords the search engines will pick up on. Don't bother trading links with a website that uses the nofollow attribute on their links, there's no point! Always check their code for links before you ask them to trade, it will look silly if you end up saying nevermind later and have to explain yourself. Do your research ahead of time! The server you are using should be configured to remain case sensitive with regards to URL's. Having a server that isn't configured to be case sensitive is a recipe for disaster. Everyone wants their website to get noticed by the search engines so that search engine users can wind up at their site. Keep in mind the advice you have read in this article and apply it to your search engine optimization efforts and you can rest assured you are ahead of the pack.