As more and more competitors and rivals enter into the world of online commerce, it becomes increasingly difficult to win the attention of prospective customers. If your business is to succeed online, you must first master the art of search engine optimization, or SEO. Use these tips and tricks to create a competitive edge online.
The most important part of SEO is making sure your site has unique and fresh content. If the content on your site does not appear elsewhere on the web, the search engines will weigh it more highly than copied content. On the same token, newer content is weighted more highly than aging content.
There are limits to what a webmaster should do to optimize search engine indexing. Some strategies for SEO can be pushed too far, resulting in spam-like, content-free web pages. Not only are these kinds of pages not appreciated by visitors, search engines will discount them in results rankings and can even drop a website, entirely, if it appears to use unethical SEO tactics.
To increase your website or blog traffic, post it in one place (e.g. to your blog or site), then work your social networking sites to build visibility and backlinks to where your content is posted. Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other news feeds are great tools to use that will significantly raise the profile of your pages.
Your meta description should make an impact and demand a call for action from the searcher. Use words and phrases that get people to respond in a motivated way. Incorporate phone numbers or specific sales dialogue that create a buying atmosphere before they even click through. Keep it short and to the point at 155 characters.
Create a page of content for each keyword you wish to optimize for a search engine. Do not try to smother your website with every possible keyword. Search engines are looking for relevant, organized content. If your page clearly discusses one specific keyword, it is much more likely to be used as a top result for that keyword search.
Providing content that can be linked to and referenced by other websites, bloggers, etc., is the simplest way to optimize your standing in search engines. Say for example you are a graphic designer and have a site that operates as your portfolio. If you were to provide unique tutorials on your website, others can discover these, appreciate them and share them on their own site, which in turn increases the amount of times your page is referenced on the whole of the Internet as well as increasing the traffic coming from those pages where your tutorials were referenced.
Adding keywords to comment tags is believed to be a good practice. Spend your time focusing on your content, not your comment tags.
If you want consumers to visit your site or search for your products and services, it is especially important that you are willing to follow through with SEO principles in your site’s coding and content. Follow the advice from this article and you will begin to see improvements in your site’s traffic and efficiency.