Search engine optimization is critical when trying to generate traffic to your website. Whether you’re a business owner, a personal blog owner, or just someone with a profession in art that wants to show off your work, optimizing your site to perform well in search rankings, may just be essential to your success. Read the tips below to help you make the most of your efforts:
Include useful external links on your website. The number of outbound links can positively affect a website’s search engine rank, however, make sure that the pages you link to are relevant and search engine optimized themselves. It is also best to link to related websites but not direct competitors, as you do not want to lose potential customers in a bid to increase your search engine rank.
Your homepage carries roughly 50 percent of the weight in searches. Up to 5 percent of your copy and links throughout the site should be weighted with keywords and phrases. This density will give depth to searches and bring your site closer to the top rankings on the major engines.
To improve the chances of users finding your site through keywords, perfect your keyword density. If you use a keyword too frequently, search engines will ignore it, and not using it enough makes it harder for search engine to recognize. A keyword density of about three to five percent is optimal for search engines, and will give you much better results.
Never use “hidden” links that visitors cannot see. These links are a holdover from the very early days of search engine optimization, when search engine crawlers would blindly follow the links and improve a website’s ranking accordingly. Today search engines are smart enough to avoid hidden links, and some will even penalize you if they find them on your website.
You can use frames in your site if you so desire, but it is not known if search engine crawlers can see them. Do not take for granted that a keyword listed inside a frame can be seen by a search engine. It may or may not be the case.
Fill your website with original, informative content. Filling your website with unique, regularly updated content related to carefully chosen keywords can help your website to rank high in search engine results. Also, if the pages of your website are helpful and interesting to your visitors, your visitors will do your off-page SEO for you.
Now, are you ready to get to work, so that you can get some results? Once you see a surge in your traffic – due to a few well placed keywords — you will be glad you invested the time necessary to do search engine optimization. Apply the tips above to make your efforts a success!