If you had a dollar for every service available on the market that says it can take your site to the top of the rankings in just a few weeks, you wouldn’t even need to be in web business. You’d be wealthy already. Stay away from those services and handle the SEO yourself. It’s not hard to do, especially if you just follow these SEO tips to get you started and help you to stay on track.

Search engines work very quickly, but they do not like to dig deep down into your directory. So make sure that you are not burying files in your directory. For example: You may have a page located at MyBusiness.net/shop/products/listings/videos/014.html. This is a long, long path. Instead, create a more streamlined directory: shop-listings/014.html.

Link to pages offering similar or related goods and services. Target your marketing to likely customers by providing a link to your website from pages offering goods or services related to what you offer. For example, if a consumer needs a mattress, they will likely need sheets and blankets as well.

If your goal is to have other bloggers link back to you, then you have to take the time to link back to them on your blog. You cannot expect anyone to help you increase traffic to your site if you are not willing to do the same for them.

Keep it simple with one URL. You do not need to have six URLs for one website. Even if the information is totally different, try to keep it all under one heading. Search engines will use different URLs for different rankings, placing you lower or higher than you should be. Customers also may get confused as to why they are constantly “leaving your site” when they really are not.

To optimize ones search engine they must program it to recognize multiple word meanings and how to identify which meaning an individual is using based of the other words it is paired with. By having ones search engine do this it will produce more relevant results for the users.

Keep your site focused on 1 or 2 keywords and phrases. If you try to include every related keyword you will suffer from keyword dilution. Focusing on too many will end up confusing both the search engines and your readers. Your rankings for all of the keywords will suffer as a result of this dilution.

When striving to increase search engine optimization it is a good idea to sign up for a PPC account with an adcenter. Having a PPC account is a surefire way to get actual search volume for your keywords. A PPC account will give you instant visibility.

To ensure long-term success for your optimization efforts, you should read up on search engine algorithms regularly. The major search engines sometimes change their algorithms, and you should be aware of any changes that will effect your tactics. You may want to subscribe to a newsletter that will report important changes to you directly.

Ultimately, one of your SEO goals should be to minimize the lines of code that search engine spiders must evaluate to determine relevance. A single website can greatly reduce the number of lines of code by as much as 20,000 by storing code and formatting data in external files, rather than embedded within the site’s source code.

Make use of social media to increase your search engine rankings. If you frequently post status updates or other content to your company’s profile on social media sites, and then link back to your main site, you increase both the number of links to your site and the chances that someone will see and click on that link. Avoid spamming social media, however, as this will damage your company’s reputation.

Once you think you’re finished optimizing your website, think again. Go back through your research and check off what has been done, and then get to doing the items you’ve forgotten or overlooked. There are also new ideas and tools for SEO popping up daily, so make sure you keep up with the latest news in the field.

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.

Keyword research should NEVER end. New competitors will pop up all the time, so check out what they’re using to drive traffic to their site. New items may be added to your website, so include the new keywords on those pages. A new hashtag might start trending that applies to your site, don’t forget to use those, too!

Hansel and Grettle used breadcrumbs but you can use them much more effectively! Breadcrumbs are arranged in a row. They are links to other pages in your site. They provide a graphical clarification of how each of your pages relate to the root page and to each other page. They facilitate not just navigation but also search engine crawling.

If your website focuses on news or otherwise constantly changing content, create a few high-quality standing pages to direct traffic to your site. These pages can be optimized for relevant keywords and provide a good base to link other sites with that topic. For example, having a centralized “election information” page to which all your election news stories are linked can really boost your search engine ranking.

A good search engine optimization tip that everyone should implement is to make sure that each title on their website is different. Do not use the same keywords or keyword phrases over and over again. Rather mix and match them in order to get unique title names that will elevate your sites search results.

As you can see, SEO isn’t hard at all. It might all be Greek to you at this point, but given a little bit of time, the mystery will start to unravel and you will understand what it expected of you by the search engines, if you want your site found among the similar sites in your category.