Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complicated field and if you want to stay ahead of the competition, your SEO skills need to be constantly reevaluated and updated. This article contains some SEO tips and ideas that will help you beat your competition’s rank in search engine results pages (SERP).

To know where you stand with your particular niche market, you should check on your page rank at least once a week. By checking your rank, you will find out varying information about how competitors are finding you and you will also realize what you need to do in order to shoot up in the rankings. Your goal should be a page rank of 1.

Getting your PageRank up requires getting, and keeping, visitors. New evidence suggests that the length of time a visitor spends on a website influences the sites rankings. There is more and more evidence suggesting that how long a visitor stays on a site affects their PageRank, according to Quantcast scores. When customers can chat, discuss, and interact with each other on your site, they are more likely to stay longer.

Give each photo you add to your pages a unique and relevant name. If you do not, then you are throwing away a huge opportunity for SEO. Search engines crawl images and if they see further proof of the page’s validity it will help with the page rank. Be sure to fill in alt tags also.

Review your product line every so often and take some time to trim the fat, especially as you start to grow. If you are doing well on your sites that offer tier 2 and subscription commissions, it may be time to let go of the ones that only offer one time payouts.

Do not be too general with your keywords. These are what will bring readers to your site, so you want to be specific. If you are talking about backpacking through Tahiti, you do not want your keyword to be “travel.” There are thousands of travel sites, and yours will definitely not get the attention it deserves.

Be descriptive with all your links, be they video, banner, text, or graphics. No one will be interested in clicking a link that simply says “Click me.” They want to know what they are getting themselves into! Using your keywords in the description can also bump you up on the search engine lists, so it is a win-win!

Before beginning a search engine optimization campaign, website owners should have the analytical tools they need to track website traffic already in place. Traffic is the yardstick webmasters use to measure the success of SEO efforts. Their analytical processes need to be in place before starting SEO so that they have a baseline for comparison.

One of the basics of search engine optimization, is the formulation of an outstanding keyword phrase for each individual page on your website. Refrain from trying to optimize your complete website around one specific keyword or phrase. You will achieve better ranking by centering your writing on each page around a specific keyword or keyword phrase.

Make sure you include unique content in your articles. Search engines will give your website higher priority for your keyword if multiple websites are sending their viewers to your blog to find out more information about a given topic. You will begin to look like the authority in your field.

Most site designers and programmers find it very tempting to fatten up your meta tags with excessive keywords. However, it is best to use restraint and avoid this common pitfall. Doing so, may actually result in having penalties attached to your site, which ultimately compromises the site’s position in search engine rankings.

When designing your website, focus more on long-term SEO efforts than short-term. Long-term SEO efforts mean designing high-quality content and updating your site regularly, in order to encourage linking. Short-term SEO focuses on beating the search engine algorithms. The flaw there is that those algorithms are constantly changing, while users’ desire for good content is continuous.

Use correct HTML code for your website! There are many free HTML code validators available online, so make use of them! Broken code can cause a spider to stop indexing your page, or even your entire website. Your SEO won’t matter if there are no search engine spiders to see it!

Be wary of hiding your domain registration information behind a privacy screen. Google may look as your domain as being owned by a potential spammer and your page rank could be negatively affected. It is better to use a local privacy service like a PO box or forwarding phone number.

Get involved in social media. Posting links to your blog posts on some of these sites can get you multiple responses that can add to your audience base. It’s a great way to draw in new readers!

Add your keywords into headlines and subtitles. Sometimes, it’s hard to write meaningful text with well-placed keywords, or maybe some people are just tired of it. Either way, an easy tip to work those keywords in is to use them in your page headline, and as section headers. This works especially well when you want to work in several long-tail keyword phrases. This also helps structure your content and make sure it really answers the promise of the page’s title.

As you optimize your site, remember that your actual business competitors and your search engine results competitors aren’t necessarily the same companies. This will determine your specific keywords as you begin to generate your site content. If you sell life insurance, your keyword should include both words: “life” and “insurance”.

If you want to bring more people to your site using search engine optimization, you should have style to your keywords by using header, italic and bold tags. Use simple CSS to style your header tags. Keywords are important, therefore, you should show this to the search engines and your visitors.

By following the advice above, you can stop wasting time and money on SEO methods that don’t work and be on your way to becoming a SEO expert. Also, by using some of the SEO techniques mentioned, you can increase your website’s SERP rank and start receiving more organic, targeted traffic to your website.