Many people don’t know where to begin when trying to optimize their website for search engines, and without knowing the factors valued by search engine algorithms, you could end up wasting a lot of resources. This article contains some tips to help make your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign successful.

To really get ahead in the web business game and earn a high ranking for your business, it is imperative that you learn about HTML title and Meta tags. You need to learn how to use them for your own site and also which tags your competitors are using. With a little bit of research, you will quickly learn about how to use quality tags and ultimately earn higher placement.

Using flash files is not a good idea for search engine optimization. Be aware of using flash as it can be very slow to load, and users will get frustrated. In addition, search engine spiders will not read keywords that are found in flash files.

To get search engine traffic from your images, make use of the ALT tag. The ALT tag allows you to add text to the image’s description, which means your image can be appropriately indexed by search engines. A high ranking in Google Image Search will draw many users to your site, and the ALT tag is the best way to achieve this.

Being ranked number one overall is the ultimate goal of every Internet marketer, but it’s not the be-all, end-all of your business. You should always strive for top placement, but do not become discouraged if you cannot achieve it. Keep focusing on quality and marketing and your business traffic will ultimately reflect your efforts.

Utilize as many free business listings as possible to increase your SEO. This is essentially advertising that doesn’t cut into your budget, and your search ranking will benefit from the increased traffic these sites drive to your website. Likewise, your business and sales are likely to increase as well.

If you want your website to get a lot of hits, it is important that you create plenty of relevant keywords. This is important because without creating these keywords, people using search engines are less likely to be directed to your page. Make sure to clearly describe what your website is about.

Linking directly from your homepage to the pages of your best-selling products will improve both usability and search engine performance. By their very nature, these internal links will see a lot of traffic. Search engines will pick up on all that traffic when they index your site and add plenty of weight to search terms that appear in the links.

Make your URL more search engine friendly by naming it with clear, easy to read words. Your URL should be easy to understand, and memorable to help drive traffic to your site, which will ultimately rank you higher with the search engines. You want your URL to be something that will be catchy enough to drive viewers to you.

Make sure that you have excellent, unique key words that will get people to your page. They should be very specific and descriptive. This way when people type in exactly what they are looking for, your site will satisfy them, and provide them with a quick stop and purchase.

When considering a professional or company to help you with your SEO efforts, be skeptical of claims that seem too good to be true. No one will be able to guarantee you the top slot on a major search engine, as this slot changes often. Unless you submit a paid advertisement, there is no way to get your site listed any higher than the rank given by the search engine spiders.

Use correct HTML code for your website! There are many free HTML code validators available online, so make use of them! Broken code can cause a spider to stop indexing your page, or even your entire website. Your SEO won’t matter if there are no search engine spiders to see it!

To ensure traffic to your website, design it for humans, not bots or web crawlers. In the obsession to rank high in search results, several web designers have forgotten to design for humans. It does not matter how high your rank is on a search engine, if you do not actually get human traffic. It is humans that generate income.

If your website doesn’t get fresh content very often, add a blog! Search engines love to index new, original information, and a website that provides such content will get more attention from their spiders. Your audience will also visit more often if they know there is something new to read. Blog at least three times a week to keep your site vital.

Make sure to visit Google Webmaster Central and enable “Enhanced image search”. This will allow Google to index your graphics and add them to it’s Google Images search results. Many people look for photos for a variety of uses, and if they also find useful content on your website, they’re likely to come back.

If you’re going to buy a text link, DON’T point it at your website! Instead, point it at your video on YouTube or any other web 2.0 site that you have in that particular niche and then have people link to your site from there. With the link pointing at a domain other than your own, you won’t be penalized by Google’s algorithms.

At times there are instances in which the best option is to start designing a site from the viewpoint of the user. Create a simple site that focuses entirely on a single, relevant topic, and closely monitor the quantity and type of referrals that lead site visitors to your page. Once you have determined this information, you can then use the full force of your SEO skills to optimize for those specific referrals.

Hopefully the tips above have given you some SEO techniques that you can implement immediately to get your website a higher search engine results page (SERP) rank. Or, perhaps the tips have helped you to decide that SEO is not for you and that you need to hire a professional SEO company instead.