If you had a dollar for every service available on the market that says it can take your site to the top of the rankings in just a few weeks, you wouldn’t even need to be in web business. You’d be wealthy already. Stay away from those services and handle the SEO yourself. It’s not hard to do, especially if you just follow these SEO tips to get you started and help you to stay on track.

Set up your website for maximum search engine ranking by using relevant keywords in the URL. Search engines place a fair amount of weight on the terms used in the URL, as long as those keywords also appear elsewhere on your page. Even if you cannot control the domain name used for your site, the names of your pages should be up to you.

Optimize your presence on search engines by getting other (reputable) sites to link to your site. If other legitimate sites are linking to you, search engines will see that you are an established presence online. Seeing that you are more in demand, the search engines place your site in a higher position.

As you begin to build your site, you will find out various ways to help customers and search engines navigate your site. One such way is to use breadcrumb navigation. This is a method of secondary navigation which makes it easier for users to navigate around your website once there. The idea is that each page is accurately described so people always know their way around.

Write great content for Internet marketing. If the quality is there, then results are sure to follow. You have to give a person a reason to want to keep revisiting your site, and as they continue to come back so will your Internet revenues. You will also see that those people will begin to share your site with others.

If you plan to retire or change your URL try to use a 301 redirect. This code is beneficial. The 404, or “Page Not Found” code can be damaging. A code 301 will tell your various search engines where they should transfer your old URLs search engine results page position to.

Creating a blog on your own website rather than another site will increase your search engine results. Of course the end result of that will be more visitors to your website.

Cloaking is a technique where one optimized site is given to the search engines and a completely different, un-optimized site is given to consumers. This practice is very controversial and may result in your site being considered spam. Take great caution if this is a road you decide to travel down.

Do not automatically redirect users to another site. Search engines see this as a malicious practice. Even if you honestly want to connect users to a new domain, it will still look as though you are trying to cheat the search engine. Instead, provide links to the new content, and encourage visitors to click through to the main webpage.

Duplicate content will subject you to spam filters of the search engines. You may be duplicating content without knowing it. It might be quicker to use the same product description over and over again, but search engines might not be able to distinguish this from spamming.

Though it is possible to maintain a websites rank in the market when you change a sites content, complete niche change is not recommended. Especially if your good rank has been caused by past link exchange activities. When you completely change your site you may cause those links to error and null your previous ranking.

To rank higher in search results, you should use an index page or a home page that you can link to. Your content is going to vary and be updated: a page might not interest people for very long. You can however rise steadily in search results by referring constantly to the same index page.

Put your keyword phrase in a slightly larger font size. The engines value text that is in a larger font size slightly higher than the rest of the text so by doing this you are putting an emphasis on your keyword phrase to the search engines which can increase your rankings.

Start a blog to increase your search results for long-tail keywords that focus on more niche aspects of your business. These keywords do not fit well in your main site content. However, writing specific blog posts on more defined keywords, draws additional site traffic. Blogs are also, more likely to receive links from other sites and increase your ranking with Google, because fresher content is crawled and indexed more often.

As you can see, SEO isn’t hard at all. It might all be Greek to you at this point, but given a little bit of time, the mystery will start to unravel and you will understand what it expected of you by the search engines, if you want your site found among the similar sites in your category.

Understanding Search Engine Optimization And How It Helps You was originally published on Spring