You’re ultimately going to read a lot of SEO information on the web, but remember that not all of it is accurate. Some people out there actually want you to fail because it’s better for their sites if you do. Ignore the tripe and the hype out there. Focus on this article and some great tips you can use in order to earn a higher ranking.

Just because most search engines will ignore your CSS and JavaScript files, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be optimized to help the search engines out. Leaving these files existing internally will slow the spiders down, because they still have to crawl them, even if they aren’t going to grab them. So remember to maintain these files externally.

Your website’s header may be the first thing visitors see, but the footer of your website is also equally important. You can use your footer to your advantage and assist spiders as they navigate through your site by duplicating your main navigation and making sure your footer links are redirecting visitors to your site’s most important pages.

Learn about search engine optimization or hire a company that specializes in it. The work you put into your site will be wasted if the site can’t be found during a web search. A good SEO plan will have you ranking higher in the results of the major search engines for keyword searches that relate to your company.

When you are trying to achieve Search Engine Optimization, do not forget the importance of the description meta-tag. This means you must have excellent grammar and no typo’s in the meta-tag. It should include at least two of your key-phrases. While the title of your site is critical in search results, an internet searcher will read the description to make their final decision on which site to click on.

Don’t just go with major search engines. There are many other link sites that are set up that have very specific directories. These can be used to your advantage because they target a specialized audience. Find the link sites that target your intended audience and go for it. These sites are there to optimize your customer base.

Maximize the use of photos and images on your website to enhance your search engine optimization. Give each visual a short interesting caption containing your important keywords. One way that search engines rank images is by the text that surrounds them, so make sure that this information is rich in keywords, including any titles or headings you may use.

Using analytic tools will help the savvy webmaster judge the effectiveness of his or her search engine optimization. Analytic tools can show exactly what keywords searchers used to locate the webmaster’s site. This allows the webmaster to tailor his or her SEO strategy even further and focus on those keywords that have proven most effective.

For optimal search engine optimization you should strive to use your keywords in any links that are posted on your page. Search engines give preferences to links over plain text so try to create links that utilize your keywords. Also test surrounding links tend to get higher preferences so use them around your links as well.

Google uses the HTML title tag to help rank websites, so ensure that yours is using your top keywords. The title tag holds more ranking weight than any other element on your website, so it needs to reflect the keywords that you’ve found drive the most traffic to your site. Don’t overdo it, though, as Google will not index long titles.

If you have recently consolidated pages on your site, you should immediately update your site map to reflect the change. This ensures that the search engines do not determine your site’s relevancy score based on dated information. Failure to do so puts your site in jeopardy of losing valuable traffic.

Double check that your page code doesn’t have any links in it that spiders may see while your audience can’t. Old code that may be commented out or invisible on the page could still contain links to pages that don’t exist, or that you don’t want spidered. Just do a quick visual search to ensure that all the links contained there are valid.

If you can afford to, try to stay away from shared server hosting. It can be a very unreliable hosting platform that can damage the work you put into helping your SEO. Maybe try sticking to cloud hosting or virtual private server. If you must use shared hosting, do your research to make sure that it has a positive reputation.

Choose a keyword phrase instead of just a keyword. Search statistics have proven that almost 60 percent of search engine queries involve two or three keywords. Try to work keyword phrases into your pages to get the best results from searches, while reducing competition. Some call these phrases long-tail keywords, and they help you by bringing more focused readers to your pages.

Omit session IDs and other unnecessary parameters from your URLs as part of good Search Engine Optimization. Short, to the point, URLs are advantageous because people can remember them and because search engines can more easily crawl and categorize them. The result will be more returns for your site!

If you want to drive more traffic to your site using search engines, you should not use more than 70 characters because the more words you have, the less weight the previous keywords will have. The first few words in the title are the most vital. Therefore, having more keywords is not necessarily a good thing.

Keywords are absolutely essential to get your website on the search engine map. All aspects of your site; titles, content, tags, URLs, and even image names; should contain plenty of words that a person might be searching for to find your content. Beware of putting too many unrelated keywords, though- this can label you as a spammer and blacklist your site.

After you’ve read and memorized these great tips, you can begin to build or rework your existing website so that it’s as search-engine-friendly as possible. If you’re putting the right SEO tweaks on your site, the search engine spiders will have no trouble at all finding it and bringing it to the top of the heap.