Search engine optimization, also called SEO, refers to the method of improving visibility of a website in a search engine, often using different methods of manipulating a search engine’s algorithm so that the search engine directs searchers that use certain keywords to their website. This article can help you understand the concept of search engine optimization and apply it to your purposes.

When setting up a page for SEO, make use of your site headers. These are the headers that break up your page into easily-read paragraphs. Search engines place weight on these headers, so long as you also use the same keywords in the text of the page. Simply putting a word in the header isn’t enough.

Increase your website traffic and the revenue from your site by ensuring it has no broken links or pages. Broken links prevent customers from navigating your site. Broken pages are even worse, since then the content is just missing. Broken content can’t be indexed by search engines either, which is also poor marketing.

When you purchase a domain name and space to house your content, remember that your provider is as important as your domain name. Search engine optimization relies on your provider being trustworthy. Your website may be compromised if your provider is vulnerable to attack. If your provider hosts illicit or unsavory content, this may reflect upon your business.

There are limits to what a webmaster should do to optimize search engine indexing. Some strategies for SEO can be pushed too far, resulting in spam-like, content-free web pages. Not only are these kinds of pages not appreciated by visitors, search engines will discount them in results rankings and can even drop a website, entirely, if it appears to use unethical SEO tactics.

Joining SEO communities is a great way to learn little insider tricks of the trade. Say Google suddenly changes their policy and begins to treat HTML title tags differently. You may not find out about this until your site falls in the rankings. But if you’re signed up to receive newsletters and e-zines from the SEO community, you will always be in the know.

When you are first starting a website, avoid using sub-domains. Google treats sub-domains as their own site for purposes of assigning them PageRank. Directories from the main site, however, have the same PageRank as the parent site. This means, for instance, that mysite.com/store will have the same PageRank as mysite.com, but store.mysite.com won’t.

Using flash files is not a good idea for search engine optimization. Be aware of using flash as it can be very slow to load, and users will get frustrated. In addition, search engine spiders will not read keywords that are found in flash files.

Do not clutter your site with useless items that take up valuable revenue space. While many of these things can add some flare or decoration, they also cost you money. Yes they may be free, however, it is just wasted space if that space could be generating income through an ad or link.

When writing your HTML page, remember to include keywords related to your content. Use keywords related to the different content of each page. Including keywords in your HTML code will help people find the page they need through a search engine. Make sure to choose popular keywords and ask yourself what would a person interested in your page look for.

Search engines such as Google will use the number of links to your website to determine how popular and relevant it is. Leave links to your website on other websites, and contact other webmasters about posting a link to your website in one of their articles. Use a visits tracking tool to determine which links are the most useful.

Writing great and unique content must be your first priority for your page to get to the top of the rankings. If you have badly written or uninteresting repetitive information people will quickly click away from your page and eventually you will slide back down the rankings to obscurity.

Ask your regular readers to sign up for your RSS feed. This will definitely increase SEO ranking since the amount of subscribers your RSS feed receives is taken into consideration. You can even offer them incentives that they will only be eligible for once they sign up for it.

For more technical and current insight into your competitors’ keywords and site content, visit each of your individual competitors’ pages and view the source page. The information contained in the pages’ code should help you to identify which keywords your competitors are using to bring in your target market.

The decision to consolidate near-duplicate pages, should be carefully considered, in terms of the number and quality of inbound links, as well as, the popularity associated with each separate page. If you consolidate, it is inevitable that at some point, a former site visitor will now have a broken link to the site that was absorbed. Consequently, you must preserve the page that has been more frequently visited and linked.

To ensure traffic to your website, design it for humans, not bots or web crawlers. In the obsession to rank high in search results, several web designers have forgotten to design for humans. It does not matter how high your rank is on a search engine, if you do not actually get human traffic. It is humans that generate income.

When looking for ways to optimize your site, start with the HTML code itself, specifically, the title tag. Your site’s title tag, which appears first in the ‘Head’ section of the code, should be very brief, approximately, 7 to 12 words. The primary keyword of your page should be present and absolutely no keywords within the title tag should be duplicated. This presents a quick and concise title for search engines.

As revealed earlier in the article, search engine optimization is simply a calculated method of directing people that are searching for a keyword on a search engine, so that they end up with your website showing up as one of the top results found. By understanding and applying the information here, you can maximize the traffic and visibility of your website.