Optimizing your web site for the major search engines is more vital than ever with the steadily increasing competition for visitors on the internet. Make sure that you know how to do this by using the techniques in this article. If you do, you will soon see your website traffic to increase.

If you own a local business and want to make yourself more visible to search engines, make sure you list your business on Google Places. This step will bring up your business to the top of a Google search and will show any information you include (address, phone, website), as well as a map. You will greatly increase visits to your website – and visits to your business.

Always check your keyword density when working towards search engine optimization goals. 3-5 percent should be the total of links or text on a page. Spread the information on your whole site, not just on your homepage. Every page needs keywords for search engines to recognize content.

Avoid unnecessary, miscellaneous data on your website. This strategy goes hand in hand with reducing the length of your page to maximize quality. Miscellaneous data and extraneous facts will only lose the attention of your visitor, which can lose your sale on the spot. Use vital information to your company that explains exactly what you are about.

Before you do any extensive optimization on your web site, make sure that it shows up in a basic web search. Type the URL of your site into a search engine and check to see if it shows up in the results. It’s also a good idea to search for your top products and services to see if they appear.

If you would like to increase your search engine traffic through back links, make use of social media. Sites like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook allow users to share your links on their own page with a simple click of a button. Many Twitter and Facebook pages have high page rankings, and being linked to from them can significantly increase the page rank of your own site.

When making a page redirect use the 301 server redirect as opposed to 302 or meta refreshes. A 301 redirect is telling the search engines that this is a permanent change and that they should update their indexes to the new page. The other types are used frequently by spammers so stay away from them unless they are needed.

Know your competition. Every business has its competition, and the best way to stay ahead of them is with knowledge. Check out their websites, and see how yours measures up. It can also be helpful to do keyword searches for the product or service you offer. If your competition is showing higher on the search results page, you can take steps to figure out why.

Create public relations materials for your business and provide industry publications, local news outlets, blogs, and other content distributors through a link on your main website. This increases your odds of being showcased or featured in relevant publications and ensures that your strongest points are put on display for the media or other distributors.

Acquiring a domain name that has already been in use is a way to give yourself a head start in the search engine rankings game. It is important to note that domain names that have been up for longer than two years are given higher priority. Review lists of recently deleted domains looking for ones that could possibly suit your new site’s purpose.

In descriptions of images, mention that it is an image. People often search for keywords plus the word picture or image. Let search engines know that your site provides images related to the search term. Search engines have a harder time indexing images, so the more information provided, the more likely you are to be included in the search results.

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 optimizing a website, you need to pick one search engine to optimize for, otherwise, things will get very complicated. The most used search engine is Google, so it’s best to start there. Many websites have articles detailing what Google is looking for, as well as, how their algorithm treats a webpage with a lower page rank.

Make sure the text surrounding an image really matches the content of the image. The text will actually affect the ranking of an image on a page, so if they have nothing to do with each other, your image could pop up in search engine results that you don’t want it to show up in.

Viral content is an amazing way to drive traffic to your website! You want people to post links to your site everywhere, and having something that catches on like wildfire is a great way to do it. Make sure you have tools for people to easily share your content, like Add to Any.

It is important to measure the success of your work with respect to search engine optimization. You need to know if what you are doing has been effectively increasing traffic to your site. One way to do this is to note the rank of a specific page before you begin search engine optimization, then compare this with the figure post search engine optimization work. If the page rank is higher, your efforts are likely working well.

By now you should have realized, if you did not already, just how important it is to optimize your site to get the best results from the search engines. Knowing how to do so is a key part of running a successful web site. So be sure to use the tips you’ve learned to raise your search rank.