In the internet world, you’re nobody if people don’t visit your site. If people aren’t finding your site when they do their internet searches, it’s like you never even bothered to make a website at all. One way to avoid that trap is by using SEO, or search engine optimization. Here are a few ways to apply SEO to your site.

Although you may outsource some of the work, SEO is still your primary job as a site owner. This means you will have to oversee the process, as tedious as it may seem at times. You cannot let the little details slip by you. One wrong keyword or a broken link today could lead to a poorly ranked site tomorrow. So be sure to stay on top of things and micromanage your site.

To optimize a website for search engines, it can sometimes, be helpful to modify the website content. By frequently incorporating phrases and words that oftentimes, tend to be entered as search terms into the content of a website, the site designers can often help to increase the traffic to that particular site.

One important tip that you should remember is that you should never republish an article at different links on your site. Google ranks pages in its SERP based on quality and considers different links to articles with similar content as a low quality link. Instead, use references to one single link.

Every link on a website that leads to an external site should be validated regularly. Links that point to missing content (broken links) are bad news. Not only are broken links annoying to website visitors, they are penalized by search engine indexing algorithms. Fixing or deleting broken links improves a website’s position on the search engine results pages.

You should always use your keyword phrases in your HTML title tag. The title tag is the main weight during a search using a search engine. If you were the reader, what words would you be likely to search for? Once those words have been identified, they should be added to your page title.

When making a page redirect use the 301 server redirect as opposed to 302 or meta refreshes. A 301 redirect is telling the search engines that this is a permanent change and that they should update their indexes to the new page. The other types are used frequently by spammers so stay away from them unless they are needed.

Use keywords effectively for search engine optimization by striking a balance between too few key words and too many keywords. Keywords should appear in the title, in your content and also in your image names. Beware of putting an overly large number of keywords all over your site to avoid having a search engine think of you as a spammer.

If you want your site to be highly ranked by the search engines, it’s important to select the best keywords and phrases for your site. You want to avoid both overly broad keywords that are used by many sites and overly narrow keywords, that few people will think to search for.

Check your site often for broken links. You don’t want to have links that you think are working, and your customers are not able to use. You can use Xenu, which is a tool that will tell you if links are broken. Test every single link you have often.

You should keep the URL structure of your site as clear as possible. This will make your site easy to navigate, but also, easy to index for better ranking in search results. You can classify your pages in different categories or by chronological order. Find what works best for the type of website that you have.

If you must use Flash on your website, boost your search engine rankings by providing an alternative HTML-only option. Not only will the search engine spiders have an easier time crawling and ranking your page, but your human site visitors will appreciate it, as well. The easier your site is to use, the more links people will make to it, which also boosts your search engine ranking.

Use unique content on your website to generate traffic. Posting information that you can find on several different websites only helps you to blend in and not stand out of the crowd. By choosing unique and original content for your website you are offering something no one else has to offer.

When optimizing your website for search engines, it is important you make one or two changes at a time. If you do too much at once you won’t be able to tell which change affected your Page Rank negatively or positively, and it’s also possible to have both good and bad changes which cancel each other out, confusing you even further.

Use a lot of keywords in the file names and URLs that you use. Make sure not to use too many hyphens because it will look like it is leading to a spam site and people will not be too sure about whether or not they want to take a chance and click on it.

When optimizing your site’s HTML code, the Meta keywords section should contain each of the keywords that are included in the Description and Title tags. Take care not to use any particular word more than four times within the section, and do not allow the length to exceed more than 45 words. This makes your code more efficient for search engines to analyze it.

To improve your search rankings, feature fresh content and lots of it, covering a variety of subjects. Stay within your niche, however, and keep the content from being too general. Expand topics within your niche by writing about other aspects involved within that niche. If you blog about baseball, include content on baseball cards, players, fans, and equipment. When you include a variety of information types on your niche, it raises the chances of your site being found on top of the search engine results.

Using SEO makes your website more attractive to search engines, which means your site will be higher up in the list results. Make sure that people see your site by implementing as many SEO tips as you can, and the result will be a spike in visitor numbers and maybe more.