What makes one website rank higher than another? This all depends on how the website is optimized for the search engines. If your website is not in the rank that you desire, it is time for you to learn the techniques of search engine optimization. This article contains some tips to get you started.

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.

Don’t crowd your site with endless repetitions of keywords and phrases in an attempt to draw more traffic. Search engines often end up ranking sites that do this lower than others. Focus on providing solid, informative content aimed at real people, and you will find that your search rank will improve.

Before venturing into the world of optimizing your search engine results, it can be beneficial to learn the lingo. Many terms such as HTML and SERP will come up regularly, and understanding them can be a huge benefit as you grow your page hits. There are many books and websites to help you learn the lingo fast.

Live by the rule that no page on your site should be more than two clicks away from your home page. Search engines hate deep links and often times ignore them. As well, by sticking to this rule, you help guarantee that all of your pages get to enjoy some residual page rank value from your home page.

Take advantage of free webmaster tools. Most credible search engines actually offer these free of charge to the website owner. These beneficial products allow you to optimize your site in several ways, including raising your ratings on the search engine providing the service. Search engines sometimes prefer that you use their tools, and take it into consideration with your ranking.

Think about including a blog on your webpage if you want to increase the chance of appearing on the most searches. Search engines are looking for updated content, so if your page is outdated, this is your best road to take. Include a blog on your site for more visitors and greater sales.

Search engine spiders are not big fans of flash based websites. They are extremely hard for them to crawl and using flash can keep you from even being indexed. If you have to use flash, make sure to include alternate text that describes what the flash is showing so that the spiders can crawl it and index your site.

When building backlinks to increase your website’s search engine results page ranking, make sure that all the URLs are the same. Search engines see http://www.website.com and http://website.com as two different destination URLs, so if you keep switching between URLs when creating backlinks you will be diluting your SEO efforts.

Include some secondary keywords in your site that relate to your primary keyword phrase. Make sure to be very judicious in your use of the secondary keywords as you do not want to dilute from your main focus. Try to keep the density of the secondary’s to no more than 1 or 2 percent of the site.

Try to get your page link on a .edu or .gov site for better search engine optimization. Because these sites are top-level domains and are considered to be very credible and reliable, people who see your link on a .edu or .gov will think you are legitimate and credible as well.

Make sure the title you give to a web page is relevant to the content. You can also include some keywords in it, if it matches the content of the page. Search engine spiders will index your page if it is judged as relevant: a good title will influence this decision.

When you remove a page from your website, really remove it! Implementing a 301 redirect is great, but search engines may still find the original page through links to it on other sites or even on your own website. Delete all obsolete files from your server when they’re no longer needed.

Validating your HTML is all well and good, but don’t forget about your CSS! A key part of SEO is having your website appear as intended. Otherwise, your monetization techniques may not even show up at all! Double check every element of your website, making sure that it appears to everyone in the same way.

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.

Try using AdWords for a better CTR (Click Thru Rate) to your site. This can help with your SEO, no matter what position you are ranked at on search engines. It is even possible to rank high for a search associated with a keyword and not have a good amount of traffic because of a low CTR.

If you’re going to buy a text link, DON’T point it at your website! Instead, point it at your video on YouTube or any other web 2.0 site that you have in that particular niche and then have people link to your site from there. With the link pointing at a domain other than your own, you won’t be penalized by Google’s algorithms.

You must remember that with SEO there is no easy input solution to getting better rankings. It is a ton of work. Generally, that work requires an entire internal makeover for your website, and it’s content. So, by implementing these when you first start designing a site – first have your site professionally designed – you can avoid future overhauls and start ranking better much sooner.

Optimizing your website is not that difficult, once you learn what the search engines like to see. Learn all that you can and put together a plan of action. Monitor your website for any positive movements in rank. If you are proactive and diligent in optimizing your website, before long, you will see positive results.