When you decided to create your website, you probably had dreams of thousands upon thousands of readers. Those dreams are attainable, but you’ll never be able to reach them without search engine optimization. Continue reading to find out what you can do to get your site optimized for all the major search engines.

When setting up a page for SEO, avoid the temptation to set up text or links specifically to manipulate search engines. For example, text that is the same color as the page background, text that is invisibly tiny, or links that are only a few pixels wide, will set off alarms at the search engine. These “black hat” methods can get your site banned entirely from the listings.

Having relevant, keyword oriented page titles is one of the best SEO strategies. By choosing titles that accurately describe your page you are better able to inform human searchers and web crawlers about the content of your site. This will naturally boost your traffic as people are better able to find your site when they search for your particular niche.

In order to know if your efforts to optimize your site’s appearance in web search results, it is important to monitor your page rank, which can be done with the Google toolbar. It is also important to monitor what keywords your visitors are entering in their search to find your site.

Do not simply focus on your web copy to carry your keywords. Incorporate your keyword into all aspects of your site. This means being creative in your domain name, folders within the site and individual page names. Keywords in these areas, along with keywords and phrases throughout your copy, greatly increase your chances.

If you are trying to search engine optimize a blog, consider enabling comments. Some people turn off comments for fear of spam, but by allowing visitors to comment on articles within your blog, you can get free, unique content for your blog. Search engines love unique content, so comments can help your blog rank higher in search engine results pages.

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.

Keep your page simple. The more time it takes to load your page due to huge, time-consuming graphics or oddly styled coding, the less likely it will be for a search engine to recommend you. Keep your readers in mind as well. You do not want to drive anyone away from your site because it simply can’t keep up in a fast-paced world.

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.

Make sure you’re using analytics on your website. Analytics allow you to measure the traffic to your site. It’ll tell you where people are located, the browser they’re using, how long they spend on the site, what they visit, and how they found the site. You can use this information to figure out what’s drawing people to your website and allow you to use that to increase your traffic.

Whatever you do, avoid using images for your links both within your site and to outside pages. The engines love text and they love sites that have a lot of links. If you are placing your links in images then you are basically hiding them from the crawlers. Avoid it or your ranking will suffer.

Sometimes focusing too much on SEO-related keywords and rules can detract from your writing quality and topic. You should start by writing for your readers. Writing a quality article should be your goal. Afterwards you can always go back and add keywords and edit it as you see fit.

As Google and other search engines have evolved over time, they have started emphasizing high quality links. Search engines are now ignoring, manually suppressing, or otherwise penalizing web sites that attempt to fraudulently attain first page status in search results. The lesson is to only present your page in an ethical and responsible manner in using valid Search Engine Optimization.

In SEO, the more backlinks you create, the better your chances of having a popular website. This will mean that your site will appear favorably on search engines. One good way to get backlinks is by adding posting content in article directories. When you post an article, you would just add a link back to your business website: Voila! Backlink!

Be very careful if you’re sponsoring links! Unless the links are actually within content that someone will want to read, they just don’t work. A good use of a paid link would be having your website linked to from a blog post reviewing an item you sell as that would drive targeted traffic to your site.

A simple way to improve your search engine rankings is to maximize not only the power of your keywords themselves, but the power of their location. Search engine algorithms weigh links — and often the text surrounding them, as well — more heavily than plain text, so utilizing your keyword phrases in and around your links is a quick, simple way to boost your search engine standings.

When your site ranks at the top for popular searches, you’ll get an incredible amount of traffic. Now that you’ve read this article, you know what you can do to get your site search engine ready. Put these tips to good use so that your site can achieve the success that you’ve dreamed of.