A lot of the SEO tips and advice you’ll read online are nothing but article marketers blowing hot air to pick up readership numbers. Always make sure that you’re watching out for false or watered-down information. In this article, we’re giving you the meat on the bone for the best tips that you can use to optimize your site.

On your website, headings are going to play a vital role in organizing information. So you need to use only a single H1 tag when you are putting your page together. You can use various subheading tags, like H2-H6, but keep things neat and clean by only using one main H1 tag.

When dealing with SEO, it is important to remember to take your time. You can’t expect to see results over night, it will take a while to build your reputation in the eyes of the search engines. Also, Google can tell if you try to artificially create links or rapidly increase your traffic and will penalize your site.

When choosing a domain name for your site, you should never settle for something irrelevant just because your preferred domain has been taken. The closer your domain name is to the subject of your site, the better you will do in the rankings. Turn on that light bulb above your head and choose a great, relevant domain name.

Try to avoid using a lot of symbols like underscores in a URL. This is very confusing to the search engines, so always remember to create a meaningful name for every URL, and try to put a relevant keyword in there that flows naturally.

Build an exceptional website. Before you do any SEO to get your website onto the first page of search results, ask yourself honestly whether your website really is one of the best 5 websites in the world on your chosen topic. If you can’t answer that question positively with confidence, then work on improving your website.

Include useful external links on your website. The number of outbound links can positively affect a website’s search engine rank, however, make sure that the pages you link to are relevant and search engine optimized themselves. It is also best to link to related websites but not direct competitors, as you do not want to lose potential customers in a bid to increase your search engine rank.

Keep the content as your base. The more content you have on your website, the more readers you will gain. No one likes to click on a site and be bombarded with links and advertisements. If you keep your own content front and center, readers will feel much more comfortable on your page and will likely keep coming back for more.

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.

Link to any .edu sites that may be relevant to the content of your site and try to contact those .edu sites to link back to you as well. Search engines place a lot of weight on .edu sites and help your site seem more legitimate, raising your rank on search results pages.

If you are trying to increase the visibility of your site all on your own, you are going to need to become a student of search engine optimization. There are several great books that you can read to begin to get introduced to the world of search engine optimization.

Use SEO tools to steal traffic from your competitors. Find out which keywords websites similar to yours use, and which keywords are used by potential customers. You can then use these keywords in your content, the descriptions of your pages and the names of your pages to rank higher than your competitors when a popular keyword is used.

Practice SEO style in your written content to enhance your keyword density and repetition. Reference keywords in their full form several times within your page content, but refrain from using the full keywords every time. Search engines still factor in the frequency of keywords within your content, though not as much as in the past. This affects where you land in search engine results pages.

Include some secondary keywords in your site that relate to your primary keyword phrase. Make sure to be very judicious in your use of the secondary keywords as you do not want to dilute from your main focus. Try to keep the density of the secondary’s to no more than 1 or 2 percent of the site.

Keep your use of robots.txt files to a minimum. These files are useful for keeping areas of your site hidden from the search engines and are perfectly fine to use. The problem comes if too much of your site is hidden behind these files. The engines will consider your site ‘forbidden’ and will stop indexing it all together.

To ensure long-term success for your optimization efforts, you should read up on search engine algorithms regularly. The major search engines sometimes change their algorithms, and you should be aware of any changes that will effect your tactics. You may want to subscribe to a newsletter that will report important changes to you directly.

Double check that your pages don’t appear to have duplicate content, even if they seem different to you. Run similar pages through a uniqueness calculator, and make sure they are get at least a 50% grade. Search engines will penalize you if they believe you are repetitively posting the same content on your website to attract traffic.

If you cannot take the time to properly format your site for the search engines, there’s no reason to start. With these tips you have just learned, that can be fairly easy to implement. All that’s left is for you to actually make the time to do it and do it correctly. As you begin to implement these tips, your site will begin to climb in the search results.