When you search for something on the internet using a search engine, how often do you go past the first page of results? If you’re like most people, you don’t need to go past page one to find what you want. And that’s why your website needs search engine optimization, or SEO. Here are a few ways to make sure your site shows up at the top of the list.

Utilizing social media is a great way to gain more exposure to your site and to rapidly improve your rankings. Join social communities that are the most relevant to your site to reach a targeted audience. With “like buttons” and similar type widgets, your traffic has the potential to improve exponentially.

Learn about search engine optimization or hire a company that specializes in it. The work you put into your site will be wasted if the site can’t be found during a web search. A good SEO plan will have you ranking higher in the results of the major search engines for keyword searches that relate to your company.

To get search engine traffic from your images, make use of the ALT tag. The ALT tag allows you to add text to the image’s description, which means your image can be appropriately indexed by search engines. A high ranking in Google Image Search will draw many users to your site, and the ALT tag is the best way to achieve this.

Include the most important keywords for your site in the left-hand navigation bar and title of your homepage. These texts will be searched before the main text on your website, so you should include the keywords with which you would like your site to be most closely associated with..

One crucial strategy for search engine optimization is to integrate internal links into your web site. Linking to pages on your own site will help boost traffic to those pages. When you add new content to your site, be sure to link back to your archives and use anchor text that includes many relevant keywords.

A few major, web-based sites have combined to start a new website, Schema.org, to help with search engine optimization. The site will list common vocabulary. This site will show webmasters and developers SEO terms, and teach them how to improve their ranking with the search engines. The goal of this site is to be a resource for site developers.

Keep your page simple. The more time it takes to load your page due to huge, time-consuming graphics or oddly styled coding, the less likely it will be for a search engine to recommend you. Keep your readers in mind as well. You do not want to drive anyone away from your site because it simply can’t keep up in a fast-paced world.

When building your affiliate website, you have to be sure your visitors can easily and quickly find your site. One way to achieve this is to help the search engines to find and correctly categorize your site. It is a good and rewarding practice to insert descriptive meta elements into your pages’ html code, as this helps the search engines to categorize your pages.

Remember that keywords or phrases on each of your pages should total to around 3 to 5 percent of the total text of the pages. Your keywords should be spread out across multiple pages, not just focusing only on the homepage, as all of your pages carry an importance. Your page can have more entry points if it has more ranks.

Make your keywords longer to gain a more targeted audience. While a shorter keyword will attract more readers overall, gaining a targeted audience can be a challenge. Using a longer keyword allows only those that search for your specifics to find you, giving you a better chance of marketing to a more targeted and direct audience.

Write the text of your web site in plain language. Do not write a long, unintelligible list of keywords, because search engines will recognize this. The search engine will notice that each keyword is surrounded by many other keywords and it will downgrade the importance of each keyword in the list.

After choosing your keyword phrase, purchase a domain name that includes your keyword. It will increase the likelihood of click-throughs, and it will give readers an instant idea as to what your site is about. This is key to rankings and is part of the reason you should always choose slightly less popular keyword phrases so that you are more likely to still find open domain names.

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.

One of the best search engine optimization techniques is to select specific and relevant keywords or keyword phrases. You will want to select a keyword, and then optimize your page to that specific word or phrase. Moreover, choosing specific keywords or keyword phrases are going to get you much better search results than using broad terms.

One of the more subtle efforts webmasters can make to optimize their sites for search engine performance is naming all of their image files descriptively. If search engines index image directories they are wasting their time if all of the pictures have generic titles. (e.g. “img_HSC_001.jpg”) Images with names like “louis-vuitton-bag-03.jpg,” on the other hand, contain keywords the search engines will pick up on.

A super easy tip for search engine optimization is to write a site that is accessible. This feature should rank high on your list of priorities when developing your web pages. By writing accessible HTML, your site will be open to both screen readers and search engine spiders. By making your pages easier to access, you will enable search engines to more readily read and rank your pages.

SEO is the best way to make sure your website gets to page one of those search results so that people will see your site and hopefully purchase your product or service. Following these tips will keep your site rising until it’s number one on the search engine results pages.