Improving the ability of your website or blog to be found is what search engine optimization is all about, but it can still be a pretty confusing concept for many people out there. Knowing how to correctly optimize pages is an acquired skill, and here are a few tips you can use to develop it.

Gateway pages will help get more traffic to your website. Your gateway pages should include a specific set of keywords, this will boost the change that this set of keywords will get a high score from the search engines. You should make several copies of this page, each with a different set of keywords.

Stay away from search engines that ask you to pay to be involved. There are hundreds of search engines that will list your site for free, some without even having to submit your details. Any site that charges for a simple listing is not only unethical, but likely an ineffective site.

Before you set out to optimize your website for search engine performance, be aware that SEO is a long-term proposition. The focus of your website and the interests of your visitors change over time, as do the methods search engines use to rank pages. The ideal SEO strategy for your site will be different in the future, so you will need to update it over time.

Open your website in a text window browser to check for errors. You want to read through everything, to make sure that your keywords are clear and that your site does not appear to be spammy. Crawlers will only see what you look at in a text browser, so it is a good idea to look at this yourself.

Create a site map with the pages of your website linked for improved SEO. Search engines use a site map to index your website, so providing one ensures the pages you want indexed are found by search engines, boosting your rankings. Make sure to limit the links included in the site map to 50. If you have more than 50, choose the 50 most important ones.

Make sure that your site is written in accessible HTML. This will make sure that both the spiders of a search engine crawl and readers can find and read your site. A site that is designed for one or the other is never going to rank in the top search results.

If you’re building a website for your business from scratch and the perfect domain name has already been taken, consider some alternatives. Adding a hyphen or two sometimes allows you to keep the same term that you originally intended to use. If the name has been taken by a dot com website, see if it’s available as a dot net domain. If possible, use a synonym for one or more of the words. As a last resort, consider purchasing an existing domain.

Keep an eye on the calendar and plan your search engine optimization strategy, to take holidays, special events and seasonal offers, into account. When you research effective keywords, you will see that holiday-related keywords spike, in the days and weeks leading to the holiday. Take advantage of these variations by tailoring, not only your content, but your optimization efforts, to the season.

For effective search engine optimization try and use a single URL to concentrate all your stories, articles or blog posts within the same category. This is an excellent way to get your search results near the top as it will cover a broader range of topics which will get your page more views.

You need to treat link building as a process that keeps going. Spend a few minutes every day on your link campaign. You can pay for services that will build your links for you, though those have proven not to be as effective as taking the time and doing it yourself.

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.

Make certain that you are always prepared to answer any questions from visitors on your site. This can help you build a reliable reputation because your visitors will most likely refer you to their group of friends and relatives. This kind of grassroots marketing is essential to helping your SEO.

Use web analytic software to track visitor and other information to your site. This should be in place from the very beginning so that you view your progress and know if your SEO efforts are paying off. Google offers free analytic and Webmaster tools, but there are other programs that are available for purchase.

If you want to improve your site’s search engine optimization and page ranking, do not use too much flash content. Search engines are, at this time, not able to read flash content. All of the time and effort you spend writing flash content will be wasted. As far as search engines go, flash content is invisible.

In order to successfully optimize your website, use a online keyword tool to determine which keywords to focus on. Effective search engine optimization requires that you not only use relevant keywords, but also use keywords that are often searched for. To use a keyword tool, simply enter the keywords that you are considering using. The results will tell you how many time these keywords were searched for.

Make sure you’re using your keywords in your images as well. If you’re selling used cars using “Used-car-1990-camaro.jpg” as the image name and “Used Car – 1990 Camaro” as the alt text, this will increase your rankings for those keywords. Plus, if the person viewing the page has images set not to load, they’ll still know what the image is.

As you can see from the article above, there isn’t anything that’s overly complicated about the process. It’s basically just stuff that you didn’t yet know and didn’t really think to check for. So, to make sure your site is found, just remember to employ the SEO tips and tricks that you’ve read above.