19 November 2013

SEO Tips To Help You Outrank The Competition

By Margene Woliver


Search engine optimization is often explained in complex terminology when it is simply a way of increasing your website's chances of ranking highly by manipulating your web content to include the words that your target audience might use to find your website. This article seeks to simplify the explanations so that search engine optimization becomes less intimidating.

When setting up site SEO, don't forget about your site's URL. Having a domain is better than a subdomain, if you can set one up. Also, any URL longer than about 10 words risks being classified as spam. You want about 3 to 4 words in the domain and no more than 6 or 7 in the page name.

To make your website more "crawl-able" for search engines, you should ensure that your website has a complete site map. If you do not know how to make one, you can find free site map generating tools online. Making your site more search engine friendly will give you a better chance of increasing your site's rankings.

When you are deciding what phrases to use throughout your site, use this quick Google test to see if your page has a chance of being a "top result." Search each of your potential key-phrases (in quotation marks) individually. Choose the key-phrase that retrieves the least amount of results. This way, you will have less competition within your search result pool.

One of the easiest ways to optimize your presence in search engine results is to register with The Open Directory Project, or the "DMOZ." When you register, you have a chance of showing up higher in user results, since websites like Google and AOL use the DMOZ to strengthen their database.

Use your strongest keywords in your site's name, in the sub-folders, and in the page names. This will help your site, as well as individual pages, rank more strongly. Search engines will give relevant pages high rank, and you can link those pages to others in your site. All of this strengthens your entire site and helps it to rank.

Make sure you focus on your title tag. Your title tag is one of the first things people see when they enter your website. It should be a unique description of the content that is located on your website and contain keywords that are related to your website. At the same time, make sure it's not too long.

Remember to effectively use the description meta tag on your website, because that is what search engines will use to summarize what a page on your website is about. Search engines will generally use a maximum of 160 characters for this description meta tag. Using the description meta tag, will go a long way toward boosting your SEO value.

You should always use your keyword phrases in your HTML title tag. The title tag is the main weight during a search using a search engine. If you were the reader, what words would you be likely to search for? Once those words have been identified, they should be added to your page title.

As presented in the simplest terms at the beginning of the article, search engine optimization simply means attracting more customers to your website, which increases profits, which is what every website wants. By absorbing the information and concepts presented in this article, you can use them to create a framework of success for your website.




About the Author: