Most people take a lot of pride in the sites they build and the businesses they put together via the web. But this pride doesn’t come without first experiencing success. No one is proud of a failed business or website. Here are some SEO tips you can use in order to make a success of your business:

You may be looking to optimize your site to cover every contingency, but you would do better to focus on a smaller, manageable number of keywords, and claim the top search spots, then to overextend yourself and try to conquer too much search territory. Pick five to ten keywords, do your homework, and then optimize your pages with that focused set of words in mind.

For search engine optimization, avoid heavy use of flash, or avoid it altogether if possible. The same goes for frames and the use of things like AJAX. This is because different pages or elements in flash or similar set-ups will all share the same link, rather than having differentiated links. This makes it harder for search engines to find.

Search engine optimize all assets found on your website. By carrying out SEO on spreadsheets (.xls), documents (.doc, .pdf), videos (.avi), audio (.mp3), presentations (.ppt) and images (.jpg, gif, .png) within your website, you can maximize the number of search queries that refer web searchers to your website and increase your website’s traffic.

Search engines can only search what is actually in your website, and not what is in an image description. Try and stay away from image description. Instead you should put a text box below the actual image so the words can be searched for in a search engine.

Code your site for optimal search engine presence. This means avoiding both nested tables and frames. If you must include these in your page layout, be sure to offer an alternative option which is linked on each page. Search engine spiders have a difficult time indexing tables and frames, plus they make pages load more slowly for site visitors.

Review your product line every so often and take some time to trim the fat, especially as you start to grow. If you are doing well on your sites that offer tier 2 and subscription commissions, it may be time to let go of the ones that only offer one time payouts.

Keep your content fresh. While having lots of content is important, it has to be up to date. A search engine will track how frequently your site is updated and this has an effect on your rank in the freshness category. Any form of change, whether it’s a news article or a blog post, will help to boost your rank.

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.

Search engines hate frames, so if you need to use them make sure to include a noframes tag and to create a full version of your site for the noframes client. If the search engines spiders can’t read your site then you are never going to move anywhere in the ranks. Creating a noframes site will ensure that you can even be indexed in the search engine.

One of the best ways to get good search engine optimization is to make unique domain names. This is very important because this will elevate the search ranking associated with your website. The more unique the domain name is, the easier it is for consumers to find your website.

When you look at competitor’s websites for search engine optimization analysis, make sure you examine their site map carefully. A competitor that gets consistent high rankings from the search engines, likely has a very well-optimized site. Inspect the keywords that show up on their site map. Ask yourself if there are any keywords on your competitor’s site that your site could use.

One way to make your site more useful to your customers and more comprehensible to search engines is to use SEO or search engine optimization. SEO is an economical method to aid in getting your site more page views by constructing pages which rank highly in search engines. It can take days for you to see results with SEO, even if you request a search engine to web crawl through you site, so don’t get discouraged when optimizing.

Using keywords in your domain name is important, but so is using them in your directory path and file names. Whichever software application you’re using to publish your website, ensure that it’s creating file names that are rich in your targeted keywords. Also, use dashes instead of underscores to separate your file name keywords.

Flash navigation might be pretty, but a search engine spider can’t even see it. If you insist on having your navigation, or entire website, built in Flash, make sure you provide alternate HTML navigation somewhere on each page. Also, have HTML pages available so that the search engine can index them and give you a correct Page Rank.

Try to use CSS as much as possible, avoiding tags like line breaks that clutter the code and slow down page load times. CSS can do everything from bolding text to aligning images, so using it is easy. The beauty of it is that you can load it outside your HTML code, meaning your page will load extremely quickly.

Don’t get involved in link exchanges where you swap with tons of sites. Exchanging links should be done between two sites, no more, so that the links created are seen as real by the search engines. They don’t see link farms as legitimate, so the time you waste getting your link on one will be wasted.

As you can deduce from the information above, search engine optimization is about making your website appeal to the engine and to your particular market. It’s a careful blend of quality control and targeted advertising that you can pull off by using what you’ve learned above. So, how about working for that first page placement?