Turn Your Site Into A Rankings Rocket With This Advice1251431231552513453432332532234144314344313133223443352415134125343125411225231353532525411325533545

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 store.mysite.com won't. Ask for help, or better yet, search for it. There are hundreds of websites available that offer innovative expertise on optimizing your search engine hits. Take advantage of them! Research the best and most current methods to keep your site running smoothly and to learn how not to get caught up in tricks that don't really work. Get to the point with keywords. Most searches are only two or three words, and if your keywords are longer than that, you may be more difficult to spot. Shorter is better. So, if you can eliminate unnecessary words, do it! Your goal is to be seen by as many people as you can, not describe everything you do in the keywords. 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. Develop a free calculator, e-book followers or other electronic product to give away on your  followers 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. Do not use trademarked terms and product names in your meta tags unless you have an arrangement to do so with the owners of the trademark. Trademark owners are fiercely protective of their valuable property online. They will not appreciate it if you use their terms to drive up your website's search index ranking. 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, contain keywords the search engines will pick up on. Keep your website updated with new substantial content. The search engines rank sites higher that are actively being worked on and updated. Sites that stay stagnant without having real content updates added tend to drop off the rankings so make sure you are adding significant additional content on a regular basis. 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. Mastering SEO takes time, but hopefully, this article has provided you with a few handy SEO tips that will help to increase your website's ranking on search engine results pages. As your website's rank increases, it should start to receive a lot more targeted, organic traffic; As a result, your business should start to receive more customers.