Most people take a lot of pride in the sites they build and the businesses they put together via the web. But this pride doesn’t come without first experiencing success. No one is proud of a failed business or website. Here are some SEO tips you can use in order to make a success of your business:

If you are looking to hire a company to do your SEO for you, make sure to research and interview them thoroughly. Determine what kind of tactics that they use for their optimization and make sure that it fits in with your brand and business strategies. Ask if they can provide references for companies that they have helped and search them. If they rank high, you may be on the right track.

When optimizing a webpage for search engines, do not let keywords take up more than twenty percent of the page’s total content. This is a cumulative figure, including every keyword incorporated in the page. Primary keywords should not make up more than five percent of content, and secondary keywords should be limited to two or three percent.

If you are trying to lower costs in your initial SEO run, use and test long tail keywords. You might be surprised at the cost/visitor ratio of certain long tail variations of popular keywords. If you can spend $100 to get 1000 visitors to your site, that’s better than spending $1000 to get 5000 visitors. Keep in mind that you might have to run several campaigns simultaneously if you use this method.

Make use of inbound, external links to optimize search engine results. Link to people you know and request them to link to you, as well. Make use of other pages by writing good quality comments and in the review section, as well. Encourage others to visit your site. Linking to other sites can result in the traffic you desire and encourage better placement in real-time searches.

Optimizing your website for search engines will improve the profitability of your affiliate marketing programs. By focusing on certain keywords and tweaking the contents of your web pages, you can significantly improve your website’s ranking on search engine results pages. This will direct more visitors to your site, increasing your own exposure and pulling in more potential customers for your affiliates.

Keep an eye on where your site stands in the search engine results. By knowing this, you will be able to tell if any efforts at raising your ranking are working at all. You can also use your referrer log to see how your visitors are arriving to your site and what search terms they are using.

When coding a site to optimize its search engine presence, be sure to include a robots.txt file somewhere in the root directory of your file system. A robots.txt file tells the search engine spiders which pages they should index and which they should ignore, ensuring that junk content doesn’t get indexed by mistake.

Look through old emails and comment boards to find ideas for new posts. Turn every question you ever answered in an email into content on the site. Remember that the way to increase search engine rankings is to constantly create new articles. Your emails probably provide plenty of topics that readers want to know about.

There are many different types of meta tag, including one for keywords – but up-to-date webmasters rarely use it. Although keywords are the heart of any search engine optimization effort, the keyword meta tag has been so debased with spam-like abuse that today search engines ignore it entirely. Do not waste time packing the keyword tag; focus on more important areas.

A popular way to optimize your search engine results is to use Google AdWord’s own keyword tool. Using it, you can examine what keywords people are using to search for specific things. With this data, you can then begin adjusting your own keywords to match what other are using, to generate more hits.

Hire a writer if need be. Some people do not have either the skill or the time to provide daily updates and quality content. If this is the case with you, look at hiring an online article writer to keep your site busy and fresh. Adding new information gives you a heads up over the competition.

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.

Ensure that your call to action is clear, concise, and easy to find. It’s great to drive thousands of interested customers to your website, but if they can’t figure out where to go to commit to what you’re selling, they can’t buy! You also don’t want to inundate them with links to purchase, but make sure you supply enough so that anyone can figure out what to do.

Make sure that the naming convention you use for your site architecture makes sense when viewed on a search engine. If your visitor is looking for crackers, but your website link is to donsstore.com/yumminums/, they’re unlikely to click through. DonsPantry.com/crackers/ looks spot on, and you can almost guarantee that the searcher will click your link. It also boosts your page rank to have keywords in the directory title.

Double check that the content on your page only touches upon one subject, and also matches your title and description meta tags. Long, rambling text that jumps from place to place is no good to anyone. Make sure the content you have is concise and informative, and that your page tags are on the same topic.

As you can deduce from the information above, search engine optimization is about making your website appeal to the engine and to your particular market. It’s a careful blend of quality control and targeted advertising that you can pull off by using what you’ve learned above. So, how about working for that first page placement?