Search Engine Optimization is no big mystery, and there is nothing unethical about it. Every website owner who wants to increase his or her site’s traffic (i.e., every smart website owner) should be willing to take steps to improve search engine rankings. Here are just a few ways a savvy webmaster can optimize ethically:

To reach the top of the search engine results page, your site needs to offer regular, fresh content. One good way to keep a stream of new content is by including a blog on your site. This will show the search engines that your site is active, and if your blog is interesting, it will naturally bring in more human traffic.

Search engine optimize all assets found on your website. By carrying out SEO on spreadsheets (.xls), documents (.doc, .pdf), videos (.avi), audio (.mp3), presentations (.ppt) and images (.jpg, gif, .png) within your website, you can maximize the number of search queries that refer web searchers to your website and increase your website’s traffic.

Your website copy should focus on what a human would search for. Trying to beat the engine with repetitive keywords will get you nowhere. The engine is smarter than that. Look for phrases and strings that will be searched for by the normal human. Effectively targeting these types of key phrases will garner more hits.

To make sure your search engine optimization is working, you should regularly check your website’s page rank. Google updates their page rankings several times a year and if you don’t see improvement, it could be a sign that what you’re doing isn’t working. For more regularly updated page rank information, you can check Alexa.

While getting noticed by search engines is exactly what you want to do, remember that your main goal should be to attract new readers, not search engines. Keep your content relevant to the interests of those visiting your site, and word of mouth may help you as well. Search engines are great, but don’t expect them to do all the work for you!

Submit your site! Many website owners overlook this simple method. Go to the search providers you know and trust, and submit your site to them. Doing this can give you the jump-start you need to start moving to a higher volume of readers. Don’t forget to submit to search directories as well.

Ask for help, or better yet, search for it. There are hundreds of websites available that offer innovative expertise on optimizing your search engine hits. Take advantage of them! Research the best and most current methods to keep your site running smoothly and to learn how not to get caught up in tricks that don’t really work.

If you want to avoid a three to six month period of your site being in a ranking abyss, do not make a lot of link exchanges or buy a lot of links right away. Take your time marketing your site slowly to the internet and your rank will go up much quicker.

Get your business and its website listed in online business directories. Most website owners know to submit their site to the major search engines, which is important. However, many fail to take advantage of the numerous free local business directories. These directories are the equivalent of the local phone book and are used by many potential customers to find local products and services.

An effective technique in the world of search engine optimization involves incorporating relevant keywords in URLs themselves. It is always optimal to have critical keywords as part of the domain name itself, but it is also useful to have them within the file name or directory pathway of your URLs. This helps search engines identify yours as a site most relevant to users based on the terms they most frequently use to find a particular type of content.

For optimal search engine optimization you should strive to use your keywords in any links that are posted on your page. Search engines give preferences to links over plain text so try to create links that utilize your keywords. Also test surrounding links tend to get higher preferences so use them around your links as well.

Long loading times are enemies to all webmasters who want to get more traffic to their sites. Load time is a significant factor in search engine performance. Pages that load slowly, are indexed slowly or even skipped over entirely. Of course, long load times are not appreciated by website visitors, either. Making pages load faster is a sound practice, all around.

Use your keywords in the file names of images, javascript files, etc. Giving files a descriptive name is great for many reasons, including for browsers that aren’t going to display the image. Try to include different keywords in the alt tag than you use in the image’s file name. Don’t go too crazy, you don’t want what you’re doing to be obvious or you look shady!

A very shallow directory structure can easily improve your site’s ranking on the results pages of major search engines. A shallow directory structure is one that contains only the bare minimum number of sub-folders. Sub-folders decrease the site’s efficiency and make it more difficult to search engine spiders to accurately assess your site’s relevancy score.

If you want to bring more people to your site using search engine optimization, you should have style to your keywords by using header, italic and bold tags. Use simple CSS to style your header tags. Keywords are important, therefore, you should show this to the search engines and your visitors.

Writing for the internet is much different that writing for business or in a scholarly setting. Learn about SEO so that you can write your articles to get picked up by the search engines and you will find that you will get more hits and gain more readers.

There simply isn’t a website online that could not benefit from increased traffic. Optimizing a website for search engine performance is a fine way to hunt for that increased traffic. Using a few of the previous suggestions may result in immediate improvements to a website’s position on the search engine results pages.