Optimizing your site with search engines is an excellent method of making sure your website stands out from the pack. You need to do plenty of homework on how SEO works. The ideas presented here will help get you ahead of the curve, and help you avoid beginner mistakes.

When setting up your site with SEO, pick a few keywords to optimize and focus your efforts on those. Trying to use too many different keywords will result in keyword dilution, where the weight of your keywords is lost in the text. If you must have many different keywords, create multiple pages that can link back to your product pages.

Make a number of mini-sites that lead back to your main site. This way, each site can focus on one or two keywords and have a fully functional site that you can optimize and get traffic for, but serves a dual purposes since it will link back to your main website. The more mini-sites you have, the more point to your original site, and that will cause it to rise in the search engine page rankings.

Don’t just go with major search engines. There are many other link sites that are set up that have very specific directories. These can be used to your advantage because they target a specialized audience. Find the link sites that target your intended audience and go for it. These sites are there to optimize your customer base.

Providing content that can be linked to and referenced by other websites, bloggers, etc., is the simplest way to optimize your standing in search engines. Say for example you are a graphic designer and have a site that operates as your portfolio. If you were to provide unique tutorials on your website, others can discover these, appreciate them and share them on their own site, which in turn increases the amount of times your page is referenced on the whole of the Internet as well as increasing the traffic coming from those pages where your tutorials were referenced.

In order to see if your SEO efforts are working, check where you stand in search engine rankings. There are many programs and tools that do this, like Google Toolbar and Alexa. If you don’t, you might be wasting your time assuming that your SEO is working while it isn’t.

Find your keywords. Search through other sites to find out what keywords will be most likely to link back to your website. Use this information to plan the keywords you will use to increase volume to your site. The better matches you have, the more likely you will be to increase visitors.

Place keyword phrases in subtitles, page breaks, and bullet points. Noticeable keywords are an efficient way to be recognized by a search engine, not to mention, for breaking up larger text blocks and preventing reader fatigue. Using these phrases as page breaks is also very appealing to the eye and these will help to remind your reader just what they were looking for in the first place.

Rather than spamming your new website information everywhere you look, it may be best to allow your website to be found naturally by search engine crawlers. If you allow this to happen, search engines will take a more favorable glance at your site, as it seems that you are working on your content, rather than getting noticed.

ALWAYS include alt and title tags on images and links! You can use keywords in these tags, but make sure that the keywords you use truly apply to the image or the site being linked to. Also, don’t use the same keywords on all the images or links – mix them up so they’re used 2-3 times each.

Don’t fall into the SEO trap of believing that links can outweigh good content. Building a site that will appear at the top of the search engine rankings isn’t about beating the algorithms, it’s about providing good content. A single link from a high-ranking site will not help you outrank other sites that have relevant, recently-updated content about your keyword.

Never underestimate the power of the focus group when designing your site and determining the most effective SEO keywords. Compare the results across different site user demographics to identify all of the common denominators. This information can then be compared against the profile of your target market to make the final decision of which keywords to focus on.

NEVER capture the personal information of site visitors for the sole purpose of spamming them with your content. This is illegal, annoying, and will have adverse reactions on your site quality and reputation. Furthermore, it is one of the fastest and most surefire ways to get your site booted from the top search engine rankings.

If you are a business thinking about hiring an outside SEO company, make sure that you vet them well. You will want to know what methods the company uses to get your site to rank high because there are SEO services that use tactics that major search engines frown upon. If the company practices what is known as Black Hat SEO, it can get your website removed from the indexes of Google and others.

Be sure that your website is easy to navigate. If your visitors have to click from page to page to page to find what they want, they will give up and leave without spending much time. Give enough information on your first page to both satisfy interest and pique curiosity. Then provide clear, working links to more pertinent information.

In the SEO world, it’s important to make sure that all of your links are text links and not image links. This is especially important when using JavaScript because the search engine robots will not follow JavaScript. Image links can be a nice part of the design of a website, but text links can be more beneficial in the long term.

Putting your website in a prime place to be found is what search engine optimization is all about. The article you have just read gave you multiple tips on how to make this happen for you. Applying these simple tricks will get your website noticed in no time, so increase your traffic today!