The most important thing for any business website, is getting as many people to visit your website as possible. Perhaps the most effective method of improving website traffic is a technique called, search engine optimization, which improves your website’s visibility on search engines. Read on to find out how you can use this to increase your visitors.

Use alt tags for images and span element titles to your advantage. Search engines look at a site’s code, not what is actually visible to a user, so if your keyword is “cat” and there is a picture of a calico cat on your site, using an alt tag of “a calico cat” for the image will expose the search engine to your keyword even if the user never sees it. The title of a span element works in the same way.

Optimize your site using breadcrumb navigation. Breadcrumb navigation means including a series of links that lead the viewer incrementally back to the homepage of your site. These make it easier for visitors to find their way around your site and increase the incidence of your target keywords, plus the search engine spiders can index your site more easily.

Link to any .edu sites that may be relevant to the content of your site and try to contact those .edu sites to link back to you as well. Search engines place a lot of weight on .edu sites and help your site seem more legitimate, raising your rank on search results pages.

One wonderful way to drive mare attention to your marketing site is to add a resource section to your site. By doing this, you can get more visibility on search engines. This inevitably will get you more traffic. Additionally, this resource section will most likely attract more potential customers.

Start from the top. You likely will not be able to tackle your entire website for optimization in a week, let alone a day. Begin by working with your top ranked pages, and move down from there. The most popular pages will be the ones to bring you the most hits from optimization anyway, but optimizing them all will bring your site ranking upwards as a whole.

Keep track of your visitors. Do so by checking your referrer logs. Things you should look out for include what keywords people are using to find your site in search engines and what websites are referring you. Use this info to increase flow through those channels and possibly add more.

There are many places you can include keywords to optimize a page’s search engine performance: No place is more important than the title of the page. While all keyword mentions are taken into account, keywords in the title are heavily weighted. A quick research trip will show you that few pages make it to the top of the search results without having relevant search terms right in their titles.

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.

When trying to fully optimize your search engine placement, it is a good idea never to publish the same article or blog post under two or more different URLs on your site. Search engines look specifically for this strategy and penalize heavily for it, so do yourself a favor and keep all URLs, totally original.

Use the right anchor text when setting up links on your website. There are certain words that you shouldn’t use because they’ll not help you in your SEO endeavors. Learn about which words to use with the help of many websites available that explain it in detail.

You should find out what issues similar sites are discussing and discuss them also. Find images and write content that they will find interesting and that they may want to discuss. This is a great way to lay the foundation for future linking that will help to get your site to rank higher on the search engines.

As Google and other search engines have evolved over time, they have started emphasizing high quality links. Search engines are now ignoring, manually suppressing, or otherwise penalizing web sites that attempt to fraudulently attain first page status in search results. The lesson is to only present your page in an ethical and responsible manner in using valid Search Engine Optimization.

Make sure that you have excellent, unique key words that will get people to your page. They should be very specific and descriptive. This way when people type in exactly what they are looking for, your site will satisfy them, and provide them with a quick stop and purchase.

If you are selecting a company or professional to help you with your SEO efforts, don’t accept any unsolicited offers, especially through email. Unsolicited email offers for help with your search engine optimization is more likely to be a scam than any legitimate company. Just like in the off-line world, businesses advertise for you to go to them and not the other way around.

Use the H2 and H3 tags sparingly as they can trick search engine spiders into thinking your website is spam. The actual algorithms and mathematical equations used by search engines to determine page rank aren’t entirely known, but many believe they have at least a good idea. The space between header tags seems to be an indicator of a spam site, so only using one (H1) can avoid that problem entirely.

You should make sure to have a site map if your site is very large. This should be linked to from each and every page of your site. This will assist the search engine bots in finding any page from your site in only two clicks.

A website that employs search engine optimization is nearly always, much more successful, than one that doesn’t. As you can see, search engine optimization is not only free, but relatively painless to implement. Follow the tips and tricks in this article to optimize your website and watch the visitors flow in.