The search engine optimization process is a crucial one for any website owner. Sites need traffic from search engines to thrive, and it takes some real effort to make your site search engine friendly. Thankfully, this article will give you plenty of tips on how to optimize your website for major search engines.

Adding high-quality content to your website is one of the best ways to improve its search engine ranking. There are so many arcane methods to improve search engine optimization that you may overlook the most straightforward and honest approach: give your website’s visitors more of what they want. Useful, informative content will be appreciated by visitors and have a ripple effect on your site’s popularity.

Your homepage carries roughly 50 percent of the weight in searches. Up to 5 percent of your copy and links throughout the site should be weighted with keywords and phrases. This density will give depth to searches and bring your site closer to the top rankings on the major engines.

Make sure that the text on your website is not too large. Large text usually will take away from the look of your site and appears very elementary. Try to stick to size 12 font that is clear and very easy to read. This will help to yield happy customers.

Make your keywords longer to gain a more targeted audience. While a shorter keyword will attract more readers overall, gaining a targeted audience can be a challenge. Using a longer keyword allows only those that search for your specifics to find you, giving you a better chance of marketing to a more targeted and direct audience.

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.

Long loading times are enemies to all webmasters who want to get more traffic to their sites. Load time is a significant factor in search engine performance. Pages that load slowly, are indexed slowly or even skipped over entirely. Of course, long load times are not appreciated by website visitors, either. Making pages load faster is a sound practice, all around.

When you want to optimize for the search engines, you need to determine what your site’s inefficiencies are. By defining these and proceeding to repair or fine tune them, you can optimize the overall performance of your site.

To get the most out of SEO, you must remember to always provide links of the highest quality. Links pointing to your site should be well-placed and you should place a lot of them. This will get you to the top quickly. Submitting high quality articles containing link exchanges that are selective will give your site a boost.

In SEO, title and META descriptions of each page are extremely important. Be sure to create descriptions and titles that both people and search engine bots will like. You should be sure they contain the keywords and are compelling. However, don’t stuff them with keywords. This is off-putting, and it will lower your ratings.

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!

Try to use CSS as much as possible, avoiding tags like line breaks that clutter the code and slow down page load times. CSS can do everything from bolding text to aligning images, so using it is easy. The beauty of it is that you can load it outside your HTML code, meaning your page will load extremely quickly.

Are you marketing through email correctly? Your emails should include your SEO keywords and include social bookmarking tools. Using an email format that is easy for people to forward to their contacts is a great idea.

Choose relevant, specific keywords. Choose one main keyword for each page, and then work that page so that the content is relevant, value-added and contains good long-tail keywords. Keep your keywords specific for better results — any keyword or keyword phrase that is too general, like “kid parties” or “weddings” is going to return so many search results you may see anyone make it to your site with those keywords.

Set up a site map page for the search engines. This will help the search engine spiders find and index the important pages of your site. The site map page can make a huge difference in your site’s visibility if it has a navigation menu that is difficult to crawl. If you have a large site, make a few site map pages. Don’t put more than 100 links on each page.

Keywords are obviously key in search engine optimization, but knowing where to use those keywords is essential. Use your keyword or keyword phrases in your posts as applicable but also use them in your links, image ALT attributes and your domain name. When providing links, don’t use “click here” use a link to your keyword or keyword phrases for search engine optimization.

One thing that cannot be stressed enough when talking about top notch search engine optimization is to make absolutely sure that every single page on your website has unique and descriptive keywords and keyword phrases in the title. This is given significant considerations by search engines in determining where you rank.

The importance of search engine optimization can’t be overstated. It’s what makes or breaks many new websites. With the advice in this article, you’ll be able to get your site optimized for search engines in no time. Once you figure out how to make search engines work for you, you’ll be able to make your website a success.