If you had a dollar for every service available on the market that says it can take your site to the top of the rankings in just a few weeks, you wouldn’t even need to be in web business. You’d be wealthy already. Stay away from those services and handle the SEO yourself. It’s not hard to do, especially if you just follow these SEO tips to get you started and help you to stay on track.

Plan your website so that the structure is clean and you avoid going too deeply into directories. Every page you write for your website should be no more than three clicks away from the homepage. People, and search engines, like to find the information they are looking for, quickly and easily.

Try to use keyword phrases that contain a minimal number of words, two or three would be most desirable. Keyword searches are statistically more likely to contain only two words. Optimize the likelihood that your site will rank high in a search in order to drive bigger results.

Research what your customers are searching for and respond to their needs. It is important to create content that relates to the keywords your visitors are actually typing in when they use a search engine. Generate additional content for searches that are top choices among your visitors and create new content based off of popular queries you have not yet covered.

Stay far away from PDF files. If a website uses PDFs, it is basically taking a very large shortcut. This is a sign of a poorly managed website, and search engines view it as such. You do not want to be sen as lazy and therefore ranked poorly by the search engines, so do not use PDFs.

Write the text of your web site in plain language. Do not write a long, unintelligible list of keywords, because search engines will recognize this. The search engine will notice that each keyword is surrounded by many other keywords and it will downgrade the importance of each keyword in the list.

If you plan on utilizing JavaScript in the coding of your site, you should take special care to store the codes in an .JS external file format. This allows the search engine spiders to quickly locate, process and evaluate, how relevant your site content is without having to scan through an entire set of Javascript codes.

When designing and coding your site map, you must be certain that it ties in to your main page’s URL. Search engines will use the information linked with the site map to select the one page from your domain that is considered to be the best total representation of your entire site. That single page is the one which will be used in search results.

Make use of social media to increase your search engine rankings. If you frequently post status updates or other content to your company’s profile on social media sites, and then link back to your main site, you increase both the number of links to your site and the chances that someone will see and click on that link. Avoid spamming social media, however, as this will damage your company’s reputation.

While a site map is a great tool in SEO, it’s better if the search engine can get around your site in a natural manner. If the spider needs to rely on your site map, that means your navigation is going to be too difficult for any user to use, too.

Open up an account at a Pay Per Click (PPC) site like Microsoft adCenter or Google AdWords. Neither of them are free services, but the amount that you pay is minimal to the amount of benefit it can give you. They both will help you increase search volume for your keywords.

Think deep, and link deeply. You need to have links coming in from other sites to as many of your pages as you can. Numerous outside links that point to numerous pages on your site let the search engines know that your site has valuable content. If all of your outside links are pointing to your home page, the search engines will probably devalue those links because of the suspicion that they were artificially created.

One way to get great search engine visibility is to model your website after a blog. Blogs are very powerfully optimized for search engines because of their large amount of links within the site, the fresh content they provide and the number of pages and headers in which to place keywords.

To improve your search engine visibility make sure to use good anchor text which is any text that contains a link. Wherever possible make a link to your own site with anchor text involving lots of keywords related to the content of the link. Search engines weigh anchor text heavily in ranking search results.

If your website focuses on news or otherwise constantly changing content, create a few high-quality standing pages to direct traffic to your site. These pages can be optimized for relevant keywords and provide a good base to link other sites with that topic. For example, having a centralized “election information” page to which all your election news stories are linked can really boost your search engine ranking.

Make sure that your website is linked to other related websites, however you do not want to let just anyone link your site. Find out which websites in your field rank the highest in terms of search engine order and then try and get your website linked with them.

Ensure that you make use of all keywords and phrases in your META tags to improve your rankings. Be sure that the keywords are popular as well as relevant to your website’s content.

As you can see, SEO isn’t hard at all. It might all be Greek to you at this point, but given a little bit of time, the mystery will start to unravel and you will understand what it expected of you by the search engines, if you want your site found among the similar sites in your category.