Search engine optimization is critical when trying to generate traffic to your website. Whether you’re a business owner, a personal blog owner, or just someone with a profession in art that wants to show off your work, optimizing your site to perform well in search rankings, may just be essential to your success. Read the tips below to help you make the most of your efforts:

The most important part of SEO is making sure your site has unique and fresh content. If the content on your site does not appear elsewhere on the web, the search engines will weigh it more highly than copied content. On the same token, newer content is weighted more highly than aging content.

If you want searchers to find you, you need to be consistently providing them with content – high-quality substance rich in the keywords they are looking for. This sounds elementary, if you are not regularly providing content to your blog or site, and if it does not contain the keywords you want your audience to find, you simply won’t get found in searches.

When creating a title tag, there are two quick and simple tips you should use to help you in the rankings. First, always make sure that the title is as relevant to the product/service/site as possible, and two, keep your tags different on each page. The more pages that are available on the search engine, the bigger presence you’ll have online.

Using the appropriate keywords in the right places is absolutely vital. These keywords should be placed in strategic spots where web crawlers take their data from. Examples of places from where web crawlers gather data are the titles, URLs, image names, and page headers. There are many more but this is where you should concentrate the bulk of your efforts.

If you are writing a blog, optimize your content by using as many heading tags as you can without depleting readability. Start with the blog title in an

tag and work down from there, with the main content of the post in an

tag. This tells search engine spiders which content you have deemed most important.

To make sure every page of your site is indexed by search engines, do not use Flash in the site’s design. Flash does not allow individual pages to be linked to, which means that search engines can’t crawl them. A separate link for each page will allow all your content to be indexed and found through search engines.

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.

A few major, web-based sites have combined to start a new website, Schema.org, to help with search engine optimization. The site will list common vocabulary. This site will show webmasters and developers SEO terms, and teach them how to improve their ranking with the search engines. The goal of this site is to be a resource for site developers.

Start from the top. You likely will not be able to tackle your entire website for optimization in a week, let alone a day. Begin by working with your top ranked pages, and move down from there. The most popular pages will be the ones to bring you the most hits from optimization anyway, but optimizing them all will bring your site ranking upwards as a whole.

Remember to effectively use the description meta tag on your website, because that is what search engines will use to summarize what a page on your website is about. Search engines will generally use a maximum of 160 characters for this description meta tag. Using the description meta tag, will go a long way toward boosting your SEO value.

Provide high quality photographs of products, and include an easy to use magnification system so customers can get a good idea of the details. Be sure that colors are accurate and that no parts are obscured by reflections. Try photographing the items from several angles and either choose the most attractive result or allow customers to view each version in turn.

Don’t let your websites URLs look like this: http://exampledomain.com/?session_id=37. These URLs come from session ID or dynamic addressing. While such systems can help you organize complex websites, note that the URLs they generate don’t say anything about the pages they reference. Permanent, descriptive URLs are another place you can include keywords for search engines to pick up when they index your site.

To rank higher in results from a search engine, include links to exterior websites in your content. Make sure you link to websites that don’t compete against you, and have content relevant to your site. For instance, you can link to an informational article or to a video.

Include some secondary keywords in your site that relate to your primary keyword phrase. Make sure to be very judicious in your use of the secondary keywords as you do not want to dilute from your main focus. Try to keep the density of the secondary’s to no more than 1 or 2 percent of the site.

Keyword placement throughout your website is key for search engine optimization. Be careful to not overdo it, but do load your keywords in the first few paragraphs. Try to get your keyword into the first paragraph twice. After that, the next 200 words on your page should contain as many instances of your keyword as you can, without overwhelming the page with it.

Now, are you ready to get to work, so that you can get some results? Once you see a surge in your traffic – due to a few well placed keywords — you will be glad you invested the time necessary to do search engine optimization. Apply the tips above to make your efforts a success!