Search engine optimization sounds very intimidating to users new to online marketing or web design and maintenance. However, with a bit of education and research, search engine optimization can be done efficiently and effectively by anyone. Read these suggestions for a few ways to make your site stand out more in search results and improve your site traffic.

When you purchase a domain name and space to house your content, remember that your provider is as important as your domain name. Search engine optimization relies on your provider being trustworthy. Your website may be compromised if your provider is vulnerable to attack. If your provider hosts illicit or unsavory content, this may reflect upon your business.

Make sure you didn’t forget to leave robots.txt set. In many cases, when a site is in development, web designers will use a robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing the site at all. Some of these same web designers forget to remove the robots.txt file when the site goes live. If you know what date your site is going live, one tip is a create a cron job that deletes the robots.txt file automatically on the designated date.

Avoid using Flash content to help with SEO because it won’t. While it looks great and can be impressive, you are not allowed to link to single pages in a Flash site. For the best results, don’t rely completely on Flash. If you want to use it, do so sparingly.

Plan your website so that the structure is clean and you avoid going too deeply into directories. Every page you write for your website should be no more than three clicks away from the homepage. People, and search engines, like to find the information they are looking for, quickly and easily.

Maximize the use of photos and images on your website to enhance your search engine optimization. Give each visual a short interesting caption containing your important keywords. One way that search engines rank images is by the text that surrounds them, so make sure that this information is rich in keywords, including any titles or headings you may use.

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.

To get the best SEO ranking, it’s important to write quality copy. Excellent copywriting is at the core of search engine optimization. It typically generates more visitors and attracts more inbound linking. Plus, the search engines, especially Google, have ways of determining how well a story is written and how useful it is, both of which are weighed in search engine ranking.

Decide whether or not you want to use a link farm. Link farms are sites without content that just have thousands of links. This is generally seen as a negative thing. However, these do appear in search engines, and can help you rise in the ranks. It is your decision as to what is most important: rapport with other sites, or search engine rankings.

Use the H2 and H3 tags sparingly as they can trick search engine spiders into thinking your website is spam. The actual algorithms and mathematical equations used by search engines to determine page rank aren’t entirely known, but many believe they have at least a good idea. The space between header tags seems to be an indicator of a spam site, so only using one (H1) can avoid that problem entirely.

Set up a strategy on getting inbound links to your website from relevant, highly-ranked websites. Of course, everyone’s goal is to find a way for Wikipedia, the most highly ranked site of all, to send us it’s link juice. Your goal should be to find other websites who’s topic matches yours to provide you with their Page Rank boosting links.

A great way to include keywords on your page is to add captions to your images. Readers like it when you do this, as it adds more explanation for what is contained in the images, which is much easier to find than if it’s within the copy itself and it gives search engines more text to index.

SEO is a great web tool that allows the search engines to filter through your content and actually find you. With a good search engine optimization strategy you can really get high rankings and not have to pay. This exposure allows people the ability to find your site easier.

Make sure to configure your hosting company’s server so that it’s case-sensitive for URLS. If not, then your entire site could end up respidered with lower case letters, splitting up your link juice.

One tip to increasing your search engine optimization is to make sure you have social media buttons on your site. You want to make sure people can find where you are on the web. Many people use sites such as Twitter and Facebook and would love to connect with you there as well.

If your site includes multiple videos, you should create a separate sitemap for them. This sitemap can then be submitted to your site account on Google Webmaster Central, where it can then be more easily accessed and analyzed by web crawlers and spiders. This also adds to the overall integrity and relevance of your site.

Do not repeat the same header tags on each and every page of your site. Make sure that all of the page tags are specific to whatever is on that page. Repeating tags may also cause a search engine to flag your site and consider it to be spam.

As discussed earlier, search engine optimization does not have to be scary or intimidating regardless of how little experience you have with building or maintaining web sites. Follow the tips in this article to find ways to optimize your search engine results easily and effectively. You can improve your site’s ranking in search results with just a little effort and education.