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.

Knowing the value of different domain endings is a good way to help with search engine optimization. For instance, focus your efforts on trying to get links from .edu websites, by writing content tailored to them or making them aware of your site, as search engines give them more weight than other endings, like .com or .org.

Use alt tags for images and span element titles to your advantage. Search engines look at a site’s code, not what is actually visible to a user, so if your keyword is “cat” and there is a picture of a calico cat on your site, using an alt tag of “a calico cat” for the image will expose the search engine to your keyword even if the user never sees it. The title of a span element works in the same way.

Keep an eye on where your site stands in the search engine results. By knowing this, you will be able to tell if any efforts at raising your ranking are working at all. You can also use your referrer log to see how your visitors are arriving to your site and what search terms they are using.

Add new content to your website in a consistent manner. This will keep your search engine rankings up because it will keep people coming back to your site to see what’s new on your pages. Additionally, new content that is well written with SEO in mind will attract the search engine bots. Adding great content to your website is a win-win proposition all around.

Provide links to other websites and blogs to increase your views. If you have an active linking system, you will improve your search results within the major search engines. Find articles that you like that relate to your content and add links to them. Be sure however to keep your page from becoming just a page of links or you’ll lose your viewers.

While trying to optimize search engine results do not use frames. Frames can ruin a website’s encounter with search engines. Search engines do not recognize frames as websites. If your website applies and uses frames, search engines will only index the home page and there is no guarantee the search engine will even do that!

If your business is not the type that requires you to refresh the content of your website regularly, you need to have a blog in the website to make sure you are producing fresh content. Search engines will place your site higher on search results pages when you regularly generate new content.

For the most optimal search engine optimization, stay away from Flash websites. While Google has improved its ability to read text within Flash files, it is still an imperfect science. For instance, any text that is part of an image file in your Flash website will not be read by Google or indexed. For the best SEO results, stick with HTML or HTML5.

It is integral for you to improve the functionality for your customers on your website. To do this, you can include a search box in the top right hand corner of your page. This gives your visitors the ability to find exactly what they want with one click of the mouse.

Do not create a site with search engine optimization as your primary goal. This won’t make your site money, but the customers do. Build your site with the visitor in mind. Ask yourself: “Is my site fun, enjoyable, or useful?” If you answered no to all of those, you will not see hits and clicks from interested people.

Avoid deep directory hierarchies to optimize your website’s search engine ranking. When a search engine has to trawl into deep sub-directories to find all of your content the indexing process slows to a crawl. Make sure that none of your website content is placed more than three sub-directories deep so search engines can index your whole site quickly.

Put your keyword phrase in your title tag. Without including that information in the title, it will be much more difficult to get click-throughs onto your site. Adding it to your title tag makes that keyword come up as the link in the index of the search engine.

Try to avoid having too many links coming from the same IP addresses. It’s tempting to add in links from other sites that you own in the hopes that it will increase your rankings, but it usually backfires. Some engines penalize you for it and others may start. Just avoid doing so to be on the safe side.

SEO is a long process, so make sure that you are patient. It is normal for you to expect to see results right away for your work. With millions of websites already online, it will take time for yours to fight its way to the front. You probably will not see results overnight, it takes patience. It may seem like you did not change anything at all because you will not see instant results. Using common keywords and linking to other sites can also make your site more visible.

Constantly evaluate your website. If you want it included in the first page of search results, it has to be one of the best. Look at your competition and ask yourself how your site stacks up. Be realistic and continue to work to make it better. Get opinions about your website from your friends and family as well.

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!