With so many online businesses competing for the consumers time and money, failure to properly utilize search engine optimization (SEO) in online efforts can easily spell doom for a company’s online operations. This selection of handpicked SEO tips and tricks will offer guidance on using SEO to drive traffic, sales volume and increase exposure.

When setting up your site with SEO, be aware of how search engine spiders view your page. For example, while using images for navigation links may look attractive to human viewers, it will hurt your search engine rankings. Your rankings, and your reputation for users with accessibility issues, will be increased if you use primarily text or at least provide a text alternative for image links.

When using SEO on your site, don’t forget about organizing your files in the directory. The more layers you have in your file directory, the less weight the search engine spiders will place on those pages. Organizing your files to be closer to the root directory will help to boost your rankings.

If you want to find a certain phrase and you’re using a search engine, put quotes around the phrase to bring back results with those exact words. “Orange juice containers” will bring back only results with those three words in that order, while simply searching for orange juice containers (without quotes), will bring back results with less accuracy.

If you want to get the best, most specific result possible, using a search engine, then use quotation marks. For example, if you want to know Andy Pettite’s statistics in the final year of his career, type: “Andy Pettite” + “final year statistics.” This ensures that the engine doesn’t pull up unnecessary results, like his statistics from the other years of his career.

Always use SEO-friendly URLs for your websites. If you use keywords in your URLs then your website will show up in a higher position in search results. Remember, hyphens in URLs are treated as spaces, but underscores or not, so for search engine purposes it is preferable to use hyphens in URLs and file names.

If possible keep CSS and JavaScript in separate files on your web sever. By doing this search engines will be able to find and index the content on your HTML web pages faster. Also, having more content than code on a web page increases a page’s rank in search engine results.

If you are trying to search engine optimize a blog, consider enabling comments. Some people turn off comments for fear of spam, but by allowing visitors to comment on articles within your blog, you can get free, unique content for your blog. Search engines love unique content, so comments can help your blog rank higher in search engine results pages.

Site maps with plenty of keywords are very good for search engine optimization. A site map allows visitors to easily navigate around your web site. Search engines use the inclusion of a site map in their consideration of where your site should be ranked.

If you want your site to rank higher in search engines, writing great content should be your highest priority when developing your site. You can add keywords until you’re blue in the face, but, if your content is mediocre, people will not keep visiting your site and search engines will not deem your site valuable.

Do not overspend on generating traffic. You do not need to buy all different kinds of traffic. Keep the traffic that you are buying specific to the information that you are offering on your site. You will not get anywhere by drawing in readers that have no interest in what you have to offer.

When searching for specific information on the World Wide Web it is useful to try various search terms and reorder those search terms. Technical terms are more likely to bring in the results you are looking for and using synonyms is a helpful search strategy as well. Search Engine Optimization recognizes such search strategies.

When you post articles on article directories to get backlinks, keep the quality of the article you are posting foremost in your mind. The reader is not reading the article to see if there might be somebody posting a backlink in it. The reader is trying to find something out, so make sure your article actually addresses question the reader may have!

To get an immediate increase in search engine traffic pay attention to the news. If you cover a soon to be searched for topic before other sites do, most search engine algorithms will place your link at the top. To get the latest scoops you can follow people relevant to your site’s topic on Twitter.

Within your site’s body copy, be sure to indicate heading tabs with the notation H#. Keep them separate from the headings that are used by other pages on your site. It is especially important to use highly relevant, useful words in these headings, which will make it easier for you to distinguish them from the rest of the code.

One essential internet marketing technique is SEO, or search engine optimization. This method requires you to use specific keywords in your site content in order to secure higher rankings on search results pages. This will get people to your site and bring you more business.

A very shallow directory structure can easily improve your site’s ranking on the results pages of major search engines. A shallow directory structure is one that contains only the bare minimum number of sub-folders. Sub-folders decrease the site’s efficiency and make it more difficult to search engine spiders to accurately assess your site’s relevancy score.

Search engines place a lot of value on links to your site on other sites, and one easy way to do this is through social media. Having social network pages on multiple sites, and link between them and your main site frequently to give yourself an edge on search engine rankings.

Rather than lose out to more tech-savvy competitors, take this opportunity to consider implementing SEO efforts to enhance your company’s online presence. Follow the advice in this article and you will be enabling your business to gain better standings on the major search engine results pages, which will ultimately drive traffic and sales.