If you have a Web site, it's crucial to learn about search engine optimization if you want to get more traffic and reach your goals -- no matter what you aim is to do with your Web site. Whether you're selling something or reaching out to people, here are some tips for using better SEO for digital marketing..
If you own a local business and want to make yourself more visible to search engines, make sure you list your business on Google Places. This step will bring up your business to the top of a Google search and will show any information you include (address, phone, website), as well as a map. You will greatly increase visits to your website - and visits to your business.
Use your strongest keywords in your site's name, in the sub-folders, and in the page names. This will help your site, as well as individual pages, rank more strongly. Search engines will give relevant pages high rank, and you can link those pages to others in your site. All of this strengthens your entire site and helps it to rank.
Avoid using keywords that are of no relevance to your website or product. When you do, web crawler bots may mistake your website as spam and blacklist your site from the search results. On the other hand, be sure to include all relevant keywords on your home page as this is the page you should want your customers to see first.
To ensure that your website is as easy as possible to crawl, keep your site architecture flat. Don't use too many sub folders, instead use descriptive names for each page. Keep your pages with the most competitive keywords in their names, close to the root folder, so they will gain a higher page rank.
To ensure that your site shows up when people search for it, be sure to register your site with the major search engines. This helps make sure that their spiders will crawl to your site. It's easy to go through their webmaster tools, and it won't cost you a thing. All you need is a free account.
Keep track of your visitors. Do so by checking your referrer logs. Things you should look out for include what keywords people are using to find your site in search engines and what websites are referring you. Use this info to increase flow through those channels and possibly add more.
Be very cautious when you link to content on other websites. While a direct link to popular or relevant contents can help your search engine optimization efforts, the owners of the site you link to may not appreciate it. The owners of content-rich sites (like those in news media) do not like visitors to access their content without seeing their homepage.
Search engines such as Google will use the number of links to your website to determine how popular and relevant it is. Leave links to your website on other websites, and contact other webmasters about posting a link to your website in one of their articles. Use a visits tracking tool to determine which links are the most useful.
In order to get better search engine optimization, add phrases and keywords to any pictures you have on your website. This will increase the chances of a search engine directing people to your page. Just remember that these keywords or phrases should focus on the main theme of your website.
If you run a website in multiple languages as part of an international business, optimize it properly for search engine indexing results by using separate copies of translated pages. There are translation solutions that rely on setting cookies and using dynamic links to provide multiple-language support, but they are inferior, for SEO purposes, to saving permanent stored pages in each language your website uses.
To help people find your site through search engines while your page rank is still low, link to your content on Reddit. Reddit is a website with a high page ranking that is frequently checked by Google. Linking to your content and giving it a keyword rich title will allow users to find your site when a search engine leads them to the Reddit page it's posted on.
Following the above tips closely truly is essential to becoming a big name in your niche. Without search engine optimization, you and your Web site miss out on a lot of opportunities to receive traffic looking for exactly what you're offering. However, with search engine optimization, you'll be able to expand and grow beyond your wildest dreams.