Have you recently built a website but cannot figure out why you don’t have traffic pouring in? You may be looking around for that proverbial “X” factor to draw visitors to your site. But before you go drop money on the net’s equivalent of the magic beans, read these SEO tips first.

In order to successfully use search engine optimization on your site, you have to commit yourself to the ongoing process. You can’t simply optimize your site once and move on. Internet businesses exist in a constantly changing market, so the SEO strategy that are working for your company this year might not work next year.

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.

Post videos of your products on the various video sites across the web. These video channels can open up your product or service to a whole new world of potential buyers who may never have visited your site on their own. Plus, these video channels tend to make it easy for a viewer to pass a link onwards to a friend, essentially increasing you market reach with no more effort on your part.

Do not double post. Putting the same content under different headings is a backwards technique that some sites use to get a consumer to reread an article. It has been shown not to work, and it even drives readers away. Many search engines even place your site based on quality of content, not quantity, and having the same things posted multiple times will not place you high on their lists.

Be descriptive with all your links, be they video, banner, text, or graphics. No one will be interested in clicking a link that simply says “Click me.” They want to know what they are getting themselves into! Using your keywords in the description can also bump you up on the search engine lists, so it is a win-win!

Mark important keywords by bolding, italicizing or underlining them. Google looks for these markings and determines that those words are keywords for your content. It will then weigh those words more heavily. Take note: Don’t bold, italicize or underline words they you do not feel are keywords, as Google will misinterpret them as important.

Make URL’s with easy, simple and user-friendly keywords. Visitors will have a general idea of what your page is about without even clicking. Search engines will take these pages and rank them under those keywords, thus improving your ranking and getting you closer to a top page listing.

Working with too many keywords is just as bad as not having any. Your site should have about a dozen keywords that everything else is centered around. Use analyzing tools to help you figure out the words that bring you the most traffic.

Writing great and unique content must be your first priority for your page to get to the top of the rankings. If you have badly written or uninteresting repetitive information people will quickly click away from your page and eventually you will slide back down the rankings to obscurity.

Whatever you do, avoid using images for your links both within your site and to outside pages. The engines love text and they love sites that have a lot of links. If you are placing your links in images then you are basically hiding them from the crawlers. Avoid it or your ranking will suffer.

The more places that your content exists on the web with a link back to you the better off you will be in the search rankings. Submit your articles to article submission websites so that other sites can post and use your content. Having links from multiple sites shows that you are a popular source for your chosen keyword contents.

To make sure your entire website is indexed by Google, submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. A good sitemap should link to every page of your site, and listing your site map on Google will assure each of those pages is listed. This can take a few weeks, but yield great results in the long run.

There is no one single method of search engine optimization, but using meta tags is a good start. When choosing your tag be sure that the keyword actually matches your website. Use a search phrase that you think your target market would use to find your product or service.

Use CSS to keep your HTML pages as clean and clear as possible. A search engine spider will look for code that has a clear structure and is easy to navigate. This will make your site easier to index. You should strive to create a site that is easy to navigate.

Whenever possible, consolidate pages that have very similar or closely corresponding text and graphics. Establish which one will be your best representation – this is the page that will show up in search results. This makes your site more efficient by reducing the amount of code that search engines must filter through to establish your site’s relevancy score.

Within your site’s body copy, be sure to indicate heading tabs with the notation H#. Keep them separate from the headings that are used by other pages on your site. It is especially important to use highly relevant, useful words in these headings, which will make it easier for you to distinguish them from the rest of the code.

Now do you understand why you should avoid those magic beans and snake oil out there? These tips above have just explained to you that earning higher page placement and better overall rankings is about catering to your market and the engine. You don’t need magic for this. You only need to use the tips above.