When you type in a web search and press enter, have you ever wondered how those sites listed on the first page actually got there? A big part of the reasons these sites are ranked so highly has to do with the optimization done to the site so that it performs well in its market. If that sounds complicated, read these tips to help simplify the matter.

Try to get your site mentioned on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus and popular blogs. Social media can be a great search engine optimization tool as networks of people can make a website very popular, very quickly. Every time somebody links to your site on a social media site, the chances of your website showing up on the first page of search engine results increase.

Avoid using Flash on websites you want to perform SEO on. Flash has long loading times and is not able to be read by the search engine crawlers, so any text in your Flash files is not going to be indexed. Succeeding with a search engine crawler means that your content should be easily found and used by them.

Searchable words are an important part of search engine optimization. Web crawling bots look for the keywords that a user enters into the search engine. You can help users find your page, by including those keywords in your website. Write advice columns on your site that include those words and people will read your advice, adding credibility to your sit. This will, in turn, bring your page rank up higher.

Achieve more success in search engine optimization by registering with Yahoo!. Yahoo! is one of the most popular search engines on the internet. Although it is a pricey membership (it costs about 300 dollars a year), it is well worth it if you want that extra boost in your search result presence.

Visit the websites of your competitors. Do internet searches for the keywords that are related to your personal business to find other sites that are related. It is a great way to get fresh ideas for your site and to learn what it is that your competitors are doing to have a successful site.

Having a blog will keep your website new and fresh and will help your ranking with search engines. Search engines crawl through websites to find new, updated content. Blogs that get crawled more frequently have more authority and a higher ranking. If you blog, you are ensuring you will constantly have new content.

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.

When building backlinks to increase your website’s search engine results page ranking, make sure that all the URLs are the same. Search engines see http://www.website.com and http://website.com as two different destination URLs, so if you keep switching between URLs when creating backlinks you will be diluting your SEO efforts.

Keep your website updated with new substantial content. The search engines rank sites higher that are actively being worked on and updated. Sites that stay stagnant without having real content updates added tend to drop off the rankings so make sure you are adding significant additional content on a regular basis.

Learn HTML before trying to write your own page. If your code is written incorrectly then the search engines will not be able to read it and it won’t get added to the index. You can validate your HTML to make sure that there are no issues in your coding of the site.

In descriptions of images, mention that it is an image. People often search for keywords plus the word picture or image. Let search engines know that your site provides images related to the search term. Search engines have a harder time indexing images, so the more information provided, the more likely you are to be included in the search results.

One best practice in SEO is to use heading tags to place keywords in the heading of the HTML code. Try not to think of headings as being part of the overall appearance or aesthetic aspect of the entire website design; it serves a far more practical purpose. Search engines use headings as a means of classifying and categorizing your site, not as a measure of attractiveness.

The decision to consolidate near-duplicate pages, should be carefully considered, in terms of the number and quality of inbound links, as well as, the popularity associated with each separate page. If you consolidate, it is inevitable that at some point, a former site visitor will now have a broken link to the site that was absorbed. Consequently, you must preserve the page that has been more frequently visited and linked.

If you are optimizing a company website, make sure you get listed in local directories. Google Maps is one of the most used services for finding companies near you, so get your company and it’s website on there ASAP. The only requirement is a telephone number as they call you to verify the listing.

When it comes to blogs, try submitting them to directories. These may not be as popular or as widespread to viewers as social networking sites, but they can provide you with some high-quality backlinks you can use for your site. Make sure to research the directories first because you don’t want to submit to one that isn’t doing well.

Nothing about the process of search engine optimization has to be complicated whatsoever. Like all things that are new to us, it may take a while to wrap your head around the tactics and tips above. But once you adjust to the methods, you’ll be able to see past the trees and into the forest. Remember to use these tips and to start formatting that site today.