Search engine optimization is the way to go in making sure your website gets picked up by Google, Yahoo and Bing. It takes more than just sprinkling in keywords though, as SEO is both a science and art form. Keep reading this article to learn some tips and tricks that can help you refine your SEO practice.

Use toils such as Google stats to see which keywords are bringing users to your site. Are there any keywords that aren’t getting the hits that you’d expect? These are the keywords that you need to improve. Make sure you’ve entered them as keywords in your page header, be sure that they are thoroughly used throughout your site, and perhaps use them in the title of one of your website’s pages.

When putting in keywords, make sure that you put in some variations of those important words. Diversifying your keywords is a great help to the overall search engine optimization of a site. This can be done as simply as using synonyms and plurals of your main keywords. This way people who are searching for similar terms will be more likely to find your page as a result.

Avoid flash as much as possible if you want to enhance your search engine optimization. Flash is not accessible to the algorithms search engines employ, rendering the content you create almost useless from a search engine optimization standpoint. Instead, use images and text menus as these are easily detected and factored into your ranking on search results pages.

Do not be too general with your keywords. These are what will bring readers to your site, so you want to be specific. If you are talking about backpacking through Tahiti, you do not want your keyword to be “travel.” There are thousands of travel sites, and yours will definitely not get the attention it deserves.

While you should be using keywords for your site, do not fill your site to the brim with keywords. Search engines such as google have sophisticated system that can determine between a normal sentence typed by a human and a sentence filled with so many keywords that it feels artificial. The more human and realistic your content sounds, the better the chances are that it will achieve a higher rankin the SERP.

Add your keywords to the anchor text of your included links. Links are another item that the search engines rank higher in importance than regular text. The more places of importance to the engine that you put your keyword, the higher they will value those words in determining where your site should be in the rankings.

Avoid guilt by association and check the pagerank of your outbound links on a regular basis. Just like a neighborhood can go bad, so can a website. Pagerank will tell you if the site is still considered good. If it’s changed get that link off your page asap.

A great program to implement in your search engine optimization is the Yahoo! Buzz Index. This tool, as its name suggests, allows you to view how popular or relevant your keywords and keyword phrases are at any given moment in time. This is great for selecting keywords you know people will search for, increasing the traffic for your page.

If there is one word that describes your business and product in a nutshell, then THAT is the keyword that you want to capitalize on. Use this information to develop a comprehensive website that is specifically designed to attract and inform visitors who were directed there by search engine results.”

When working on search engine optimization, remember to build a site map page for your site. If your site is very large you can have two site map pages. Spider bots are only able to index pages that can be crawled. A site map is a way to help spiders find all of the information contained on your site.

Make sure that you have excellent, unique key words that will get people to your page. They should be very specific and descriptive. This way when people type in exactly what they are looking for, your site will satisfy them, and provide them with a quick stop and purchase.

When you’re thinking of getting inbound links, don’t forget about locations outside of a website. Twitter, Facebook, and even email are great places to convince people to link to you. Twitter and Facebook are very important as people tend to trust what their friends post even more than an expert website.

A great way to include keywords on your page is to add captions to your images. Readers like it when you do this, as it adds more explanation for what is contained in the images, which is much easier to find than if it’s within the copy itself and it gives search engines more text to index.

It is important to measure the success of your work with respect to search engine optimization. You need to know if what you are doing has been effectively increasing traffic to your site. One way to do this is to note the rank of a specific page before you begin search engine optimization, then compare this with the figure post search engine optimization work. If the page rank is higher, your efforts are likely working well.

If you decide to do your own SEO and not hire a company to do it, then you should do your best to learn as much as you can about it. There are lots of books and websites available that will show you exactly how everything works, and guide you through the entire process.

When you take a look at your site ask yourself if you could see it being one of the top web sites online and if it deserves to be at the top of the search results. If the answer is no then you need to do what you can to change that.

Everyone wants their website to get noticed by the search engines so that search engine users can wind up at their site. Keep in mind the advice you have read in this article and apply it to your search engine optimization efforts and you can rest assured you are ahead of the pack.