For any business with an online presence, the key to increasing site traffic, as well as, increasing sales and profits, is by utilizing search engine optimization. The way to do this is by educating yourself on what tactics do and do not work in terms of optimizing your site and increasing search page rank. This article contains a number of search engine optimization tips.

Use video on your website. Video is explosive right now, and why not? People enjoy putting a face with the words. Creating a short video for people will make you much more exciting compared to those who are too nervous to get in front of the camera. A video is the perfect way to interact naturally with prospective customers.

Clean up your blog space and remove unnecessary widgets and graphics. You want people to be comfortable spending time on your blog so they read more content. The more they read, the more they can be pushed towards the affiliate products you are promoting. Be sure to make your blog easy to read by using colors and fonts that look nice and have a good amount of contrast.

Don’t do any more SEO until you have web analytics in place. You need web analytics software so that you can clearly see which SEO methods are working and which are not worth your time. Without this software, you will not be able to optimize your SEO effects and could waste a lot of valuable time and money on methods that don’t bring any results.

Check each page of your website and make sure it has a META description. If it doesn’t, then you need to edit the page and add one. The description often shows up in search engines, so use action statements that grab the searcher’s attention. This is also a good place to use strong keywords. Check existing META descriptions and improve them if needed. Limit the description to 155 characters.

Before you do any extensive optimization on your web site, make sure that it shows up in a basic web search. Type the URL of your site into a search engine and check to see if it shows up in the results. It’s also a good idea to search for your top products and services to see if they appear.

Try to move yourself away from the more rigid AP style rules, especially on second references, and toward an SEO-friendly usage of full names in subsequent references within your story. This will benefit you because the search engine results page is still based, in part, on keyword density and repetition.

When you decide to optimize your business website for search engine indexing, give the process a try for yourself before spending money on SEO consultants. While SEO is a pretty deep field with lots of esoteric subjects to learn, you can make some pretty impressive efforts with just a little study. Trying your own hand first will also make you a better judge of your SEO consultant’s performance if you hire one.

Keywords are important to search engine optimization, but watch out how many you put. If you put an insane amount of keywords on your site, it will get labeled as spam. Search engine spiders are programmed to ignore sites that are guilty of placing their keywords too frequently on their site. Use good judgement in your keyword use.

If the title of your page is very interesting, it still won’t help your ratings if it doesn’t include your keyword. Be sure to mention the keyword of your content once in the title of your page to make its subject clear to search engine bots and human beings. Also, remember to use your keyword in your META description of the page.

If you are considering consolidating two or more similar pages, you should first identify the relative quantity and quality of your inbound links. This can be done by using the simple command “link:domain.com/yourpage.html”? from the Google search page. Yahoo Site Explorer offers a similar option for checking specific back links.

Do not use 301 redirects on a page that no longer exists on your website. Instead, use a 401 Gone error page to indicate the page is well and truly gone from your website. A 301 redirect should only be used if the content has actually been moved to another page.

Don’t forget to include the keywords in your copy! If you use keywords in your title, description, alt tags, etc. that don’t appear in the copy, it is unlikely they will affectse your Page Rank. Use the keywords in the copy as well, but make sure they’re included in a way that reads naturally.

Using words like “photo”, “image”, or “picture” in the ALT text on your IMG tags can help target searchers to your site. People will often search for a keyword plus one of those three words to try to find the graphic they’re looking for. Bring them to your site and provide the information!

Always make sure to go back and optimize your site’s older content pages frequently. If your older material does not appear in rankings like it should you need to analyze it. Once you do that, you can tweak it and update it to help it get better search engine rankings.

Omit session IDs and other unnecessary parameters from your URLs as part of good Search Engine Optimization. Short, to the point, URLs are advantageous because people can remember them and because search engines can more easily crawl and categorize them. The result will be more returns for your site!

As was mentioned earlier in this article, the key to your website’s performance, is search engine optimization. If your site is properly optimized, it will increase its search page rank and, as a result, will have many more daily visitors. The more visitors you have to your site, the more profit you will make. Apply the search engine optimization advice contained in this article and you will be on your way to increasing your site’s traffic and making a lot more money.