Search engine optimization – the process of tweaking webpages to get better rankings on the search engine results pages – is not just a matter for the most technologically-savvy webmasters. There are simple tips that any website owner can use to dramatically improve their website’s search engine performance. This article shares just a few of them.

Optimize your presence on search engines by getting other (reputable) sites to link to your site. If other legitimate sites are linking to you, search engines will see that you are an established presence online. Seeing that you are more in demand, the search engines place your site in a higher position.

In order to improve search engine optimization, ensure you only post the same article on your website under one URL- don’t duplicate it in different places. This works because search engines rank partly according to how many other places link to a URL, and having more than one URL will weaken this effect considerably.

After you chose the keywords you are going to use throughout your site, be sure to use them in the title of your webpage as well. Your title should be relevant, it will be the first impression that you leave with users who may or may not visit your site. Initially, you want to cater to what the consumers are looking for, which is probably not your business name.

Pictures and graphics are great for the visual aspect of your web page. Unfortunately, search engines cannot interpret them (unless a user is doing a specific image search). If you have an awesome image, make sure you have an awesome, descriptive text caption to go with it. If you are familiar with HTML, use an “ALT” tag for this: it will allow you to write a lengthy description that you can fill with search-engine-friendly keywords.

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.

Be aware that search spiders cannot read images, they can only read text. You need to include text in the descriptions of your images and image tags so that they can be found in search engine results. Using the image’s “ALT” tag, you can add keywords and text, that can help the spider effectively find your image by reading around it.

Check your bounce rate and lower it as much as possible. Your bounce rate is how quickly someone clicks into your site and then leaves. Search engines interpret a high bounce rate as a signal that your website was not helpful when searching on that keyword. This damages your standing in the SERPS.

Once you have narrowed down the scope of your business venture, you need to consider further refinement until you know exactly what keywords you are trying to hit with your business. Carefully examine each keyword to make sure you are making your website according to the market you are interested in.

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.

Use plenty of pictures on your site, and include captions on all of them or around them. Spiders cannot search your photos, but they can search through the text on your site. Using the photos to enhance your site is a beautiful way to get around those pesky spider programs.

A great way to increase your search engine optimization is to link other peoples content to yours and having your content linked by others. This networking strategy is excellent for promoting your site allowing other sites to do your work for you. This is a sure fire way to increase the hits on your pages.

You should avoid creating entire pages that are filled with nothing but links. Instead, try to include links as a natural part of your content. Link pages won’t be high up on search engine results and they are boring to visitors. Your content will be more professional looking, and it will be in context for search engines if you incorporate your links into your articles naturally.

If you’re using a server that’s shared, make sure you’re not using a proxy that shares with a site that’s been banned. If you share a server with a spam or banned site, your ratings and traffic will be harmed.

Once you have chosen your key words and your pages are ready to go, get listed in the best directories. Being listed in directories is free ,and they are used by the major search engines to build their own directories. It’s believed that if you get listed in the best directories, you will be highly ranked in the search engines.

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!

Search engine optimization takes work, time, and patience. Generating traffic to a site can be as simple or complicated as you want to make it. The one common thread that remains, no matter how complicated or simple the technique, is that they all take work. It takes more than just pushing a button. Once you have employed your technique or techniques you have to give them time to work or to not work.

Hopefully this article has illustrated that SEO is not a mysterious process set aside for the technologically illuminated ones of the online world. Good SEO is not a matter of arcane practices or total devotion; a webmaster at any level of technical know-how can easily implement basic SEO tactics and see a dramatic improvement in search engine performance.