Turn Your Site Into A Rankings Rocket With This Advice4555534511413121251344514243155144115225532124452453411112445255533515324534535353433252325313234455

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. Joining SEO communities is a great way to learn little insider tricks of the trade. Say Google suddenly changes their policy and begins to treat HTML title tags differently. You may not find out about this until your site falls in the rankings. But if you're signed up to receive newsletters and e-zines from the SEO community, you will always be in the know. 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. Place links in key places to guarantee they get noticed. They do not need flashing lights around them or obnoxious bold lettering, but it is important to make sure links get noticed. Put them in places that people typically look on traffic a website. This is often near the comments, along the sidebar, or underneath headlines. It should go without saying that one of the keys to search engine optimization is to promote your website. Make great use of all the social networking tools at your disposal and don't forget to set up a newsletter and RSS feeds to give your visitors new reasons to keep coming back for more. Have your pages as close to the root directory as possible. The deeper into the sub directories a page is place the less likely the search engine is to rank it highly. The reasoning is that items that are directly off of a root directory as generally considered more important the sites that are deeper within. 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. Make your website URL more SEO-friendly. Incorporate some or all of your keywords in your site address, like "www.mysite.com/antique-book-store". This will help search engines find your site. Also, use hyphens rather than underscores because hyphens count as spaces but underscores do not. But don't do it too much; having multiple dashes make your link look like spam and people might not click on them. Building backlinks followers 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. Having a blog on your company website increases its search engine ratings because it makes the website competitive outside of its product keyword areas. Your company may have very strong keywords on every page, but so do other companies that sell the same product. Adding a blog opens up a whole new world of keywords because the content is not so structured. 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. 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. 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.