Improving the ability of your website or blog to be found is what search engine optimization is all about, but it can still be a pretty confusing concept for many people out there. Knowing how to correctly optimize pages is an acquired skill, and here are a few tips you can use to develop it.

Set up your website for maximum search engine ranking by using relevant keywords in the URL. Search engines place a fair amount of weight on the terms used in the URL, as long as those keywords also appear elsewhere on your page. Even if you cannot control the domain name used for your site, the names of your pages should be up to you.

Search engine optimization is ideal for businesses that conduct their business locally. Google and other search engines offer ways for you to edit your own business listing, making it ripe for search engine optimization. This way, people searching for specific keywords on a local search will be more likely to find your business.

Make sure you didn’t forget to leave robots.txt set. In many cases, when a site is in development, web designers will use a robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing the site at all. Some of these same web designers forget to remove the robots.txt file when the site goes live. If you know what date your site is going live, one tip is a create a cron job that deletes the robots.txt file automatically on the designated date.

Show your consumer why they need your products. This may seem obvious, but many people don’t realize why your products could make their lives easier! Use video, blogs, step-by-step instructions, and live demonstrations. Make it clear to them that your product is necessary to help them in their daily lives.

Never use an unauthorized program to help you submit your site to a search engine. Many search engines have detectors to see if you are using such a tactic and if you are, they will permanently ban your site from any of their listings. This is called being blacklisted.

Utilize as many free business listings as possible to increase your SEO. This is essentially advertising that doesn’t cut into your budget, and your search ranking will benefit from the increased traffic these sites drive to your website. Likewise, your business and sales are likely to increase as well.

If you know how people will search for you, you will know what keywords to use when building your site. Make sure to include the keywords in your title tags and main content. Be aware that “keyword stuffing” is a grave offense that could get your site de-listed from search engines.

Pick a keyword for the article that you are writing. It doesn’t matter how good your article is if nobody can find it during an Internet search. Use long tail keywords as much as possible. Some search engines have a keyword tool that will allow you to see what keywords have been searched the most; choose something that has a couple hundred hits each month.

If your site has an archive of older content, you can boost your search engine rankings by linking back to it frequently when new content is posted. The more links that exist pointing to a specific piece of content, the higher it is rated. Also, having new content linked to old content increases the perceived relevance of the old content.

When optimizing your site, pay attention to the weight of external links. Being linked from a site with a .edu is better than a .com or other suffix. You can get a link from a .edu site by finding an academic institution or charity that is looking for sponsors, and offer money in exchange for links or ads.

Make sure your code is lean, not heavy. Use external javascript or iframes to ensure that your actual page is loading quickly and smoothly. The items that end up in javascript or an iframe, like advertising, tends not to be something you would want indexed by a search engine anyway.

Never get rid of a 301 redirect! There’s absolutely no point to getting rid of it anyway; it’s not like it’s cluttering up your server or taking up major hard drive space. Backup your redirects as well because you never know when your server might melt down or your host might go under.

If you are optimizing a blog, your post title tag should be optimized separately from your blog title. It is important to try to use the major keywords you’ve selected for the topic of your blog in the post title tag as major Internet search engines will index those tags and put a high priority on them.

If you’re trying to drive traffic to your website through Google Adwords, do NOT link to any pages that disable the back button. Honestly, most of your audience will be upset if they’re not permitted to go backwards as they feel they should be able to move around as they please. Also, Google, on the other hand, will remove your link if you remove the back button.

Search engines display your site in their returns by reproducing your web page’s title tag. One way to make your tag stand out in the search engine returns is to precede the text and follow it with a symbol. This has the effect of catching the searchers eye and drawing it to your listing.

Confirm that your server is set up to recognize case sensitivity on URLs. There are numerous negative effects not doing so can have on your rating.

If you don’t want to have a link spidered on your website, you can bury it in JavaScript – but only an externally linked file. Google has figured out how to read JavaScript and extract URLs from it, which is the last thing you want! Make sure you’re linking to an external file and you’ll be fine.

As you can see from the article above, there isn’t anything that’s overly complicated about the process. It’s basically just stuff that you didn’t yet know and didn’t really think to check for. So, to make sure your site is found, just remember to employ the SEO tips and tricks that you’ve read above.