Search engine optimization, or SEO, is increasingly important for anyone who wants their website to be noticed. If your site doesn’t show up near the top of the first page of internet search results, you are going to miss out on a lot of visitors. This article will give you some tips on how you can improve your site’s search ranking.

Search engine optimization is perhaps one of the greatest marketing tools to come about online, but without proper article submissions it won’t work out to your liking. That is why it’s imperative to search and find the best article directories to submit your hard earned work and watch the numbers start to add up.

For search engine optimization, the first thing you should do is register with Google and other search engines (such as Yahoo! and Bing). You can visit a special site, fill out a very short form with your website address and you’ll likely be “crawled,” in other words added, by that search engine faster.

Write website content that human beings can understand and enjoy. Keyword injected nonsense just isn’t going to work. Search engines are programmed to differentiate between actual sentences and strings of words. They know a paragraph shouldn’t have the same sentence repeated over and over. If you fill your site with valuable content then the SERPS will reward you.

When you are trying to achieve Search Engine Optimization, do not forget the importance of the description meta-tag. This means you must have excellent grammar and no typo’s in the meta-tag. It should include at least two of your key-phrases. While the title of your site is critical in search results, an internet searcher will read the description to make their final decision on which site to click on.

How you present keywords is just as important as using them consistently. By adding bold or italic tags, you impart importance to your visitors and draw their attention to them. This also has an impact on the search engines. This simple addition brings weight to searches and drives visitors to act.

Link to any .edu sites that may be relevant to the content of your site and try to contact those .edu sites to link back to you as well. Search engines place a lot of weight on .edu sites and help your site seem more legitimate, raising your rank on search results pages.

Use a link wheel if you want, but be cautious. Link wheels allow your site to gain many links to it, quickly increasing your rankings. However, you must be careful not to have your site grow too quickly, because search engines are aware of this tactic and may blacklist you if they believe you are doing it.

Audit click through patterns to see how your customers end up buying (or not). There is software that will track every click visitors make. If you see that a certain page is leading many customers to a purchase, consider making it more prominent on your site and using similar language on other pages of your site.

Stealing is always a poor business strategy. No ethical website owner attempts to optimize his or her website’s search engine ranking by lifting content from other websites. Not only is this practice, usually a violation of legal copyright, it is one of the easiest types of theft to track. Automated programs can quickly locate stolen content and land thieving webmasters in hot water.

If you need to change the structure of your website and offer the same content under a different URL, make sure the old URL redirects to the new URL or to a page with a link towards the new page. A page with a 404 error will lower your rankings in search results.

Link to high-quality content on other sites to improve your search engine rankings. Linking to good quality content is important to the linking process. Search engines value more heavily off-site linking to valid information than they do to inter-website links. Linking options that let you correspondingly link to yourself, like link exchanges, will also increase your rank.

Add your keywords to the anchor text of your included links. Links are another item that the search engines rank higher in importance than regular text. The more places of importance to the engine that you put your keyword, the higher they will value those words in determining where your site should be in the rankings.

Search engine spiders are not big fans of flash based websites. They are extremely hard for them to crawl and using flash can keep you from even being indexed. If you have to use flash, make sure to include alternate text that describes what the flash is showing so that the spiders can crawl it and index your site.

To improve your webpage, ask several people to analyze the quality of your site and the things that need to be improved upon your launch. Even though you may like the feel and look of your site, you are trying to appeal to potential clients. Therefore, it is imperative to poll a wide range of personalities.

Anyone who is new to the world of search engine optimization should begin using available online research tools to identify the most useful keywords for the particular type of content for which increased visitor traffic is needed. By doing so, it will be possible to learn roughly how often searches are performed using potential combinations of words and phrases, helping narrow list of effective choices for any given topic.

If you want your site to be highly ranked by the search engines, it’s important to select the best keywords and phrases for your site. You want to avoid both overly broad keywords that are used by many sites and overly narrow keywords, that few people will think to search for.

By now you have learned that improving your site’s search ranking doesn’t require secret insider knowledge or genius-level coding skills. Instead, by following a few simple principles, you’ll be able to boost your site’s visibility and attract more traffic than you ever dreamed you could. Just use these techniques and watch your traffic soar!