Have you recently built a website but cannot figure out why you don’t have traffic pouring in? You may be looking around for that proverbial “X” factor to draw visitors to your site. But before you go drop money on the net’s equivalent of the magic beans, read these SEO tips first.

Write and submit articles to article directories. Not only will this increase your exposure and give you multiple platforms to express your expertise in your field, the link to your site in the author resource box will result in higher search engine rankings for your site. If someone uses your article from a directory, that’s even better.

Avoid using AJAX for your most critical content. Search engines only “see” what is in the site’s code. If an AJAX call retrieves something from the server, then it will be completely invisible to search engines. If you must use AJAX, one alternative is to create a no-frills, AJAX-free version of the site that search engines can index.

Look for non-profit or education sites that will link to your site. Search engine spiders will give you credit for having a link posted on a trusted website. By providing high-quality content on your site, you can entice websites with solid reputations to feature you. Create material that these companies will benefit from.

If you are using images on your site, incorporate your keywords and phrases into image tags and file names. By doing so, you add weight to the engines and increase your percentage of copy weight greatly. Each image should carry some amount of this phrasing, or it might be a wasted image.

Try not to overextend yourself and include more keywords than you need. Try to focus on a few keywords that really capture your site’s essence. You can find the keyphrases that generate traffic using analytical tools.

Give your customers points toward free products. Be generous with the points, so it is easy for them to visualize cashing them in after a few orders. The points could be toward products or information, available only to those redeeming points, so customers feel special because they have access to those products. Another option is to throw in a freebie of some sort, with every order.

Bold your keywords to allow search engine crawlers an easier hunt. Crawlers are intelligent, but sometimes they may have difficulty recognizing what your keywords are. To alleviate this issue, highlight your keywords by putting them in bold. It will make them easier to find, take less time for the crawler, and put you higher in the rankings.

Remember to search engine optimize your articles before publishing them. By including keywords in the title and body of an article on your website, you can increase your website’s search engine results page rank. The higher your website’s page rank, the more targeted, organic visitors you will get to your website.

When crafting your website to maximize traffic through keyword searches, it is important to be as direct, relevant, and specific as possible. Achieving a high search engine rank with a broad term such as “baked goods,” for example, is likely to be much more difficult than doing so with a keyword phrase like “three-layer fudge caramel cake.” Selecting keywords with clarity and precision will help you rise above the search engine competition.

Try to avoid having too many links coming from the same IP addresses. It’s tempting to add in links from other sites that you own in the hopes that it will increase your rankings, but it usually backfires. Some engines penalize you for it and others may start. Just avoid doing so to be on the safe side.

Develop and deploy a solid social media strategy, or get left behind by search engines. Everyone, from small brick and mortar businesses, to mega corporations, is on board the social media train. Not having an approach to this angle of internet marketing, is certainb business suicide with search engines. So have a vivid and constant presence in social media.

To get better traffic from your site’s RSS feed, use keywords there just like you would on your own page. This will help users to find your feed through search engine, which will lead to more visitors for your site. The best places to insert keywords are your feed’s title and description.

When making permalinks, make sure you are using ones that are search engine friendly. Try not to use any unusual characters like “&’, “?’, or ‘!’. Use less complicated characters that are more easily recognizable to search engines. This will make sure that you show up just a little earlier in the search engine’s results.

Enlist your public relations and publicity departments in your search engine optimization efforts. Provide detailed and clear instructions about the structure of your press releases and media blurbs. Be sure to include a list of keywords that must be included in every piece and then indicate the number of times each keyword is to be included.

One tip for increasing search engine optimization on your own blog is to guest post on other blogs. This will put your name and blog out there and drive traffic back to your own site. You can always trade with another blogger and both of you can benefit from helping each other.

Make sure that you use a proper permalink structure, otherwise it could eat up valuable space that can be used for the SEO of your site. Modify it to where you can create completely relative links to your content. Don’t allow that space to be filled with gibberish, keep it relative to your content to help your search engine ranking.

Now do you understand why you should avoid those magic beans and snake oil out there? These tips above have just explained to you that earning higher page placement and better overall rankings is about catering to your market and the engine. You don’t need magic for this. You only need to use the tips above.