Fine tuning SEO by keeping up to date with the search engine changes, bolding, ALT tags, and meta keyword tags. When it comes to optimizing your sites for search engines there is a seemingly endless list of things you can do. The search engines are constantly changing and modifying the way they rank sites so having a well rounded site with good overall SEO is one of the best ways you can go about getting a good ranking and making sure you keep it. Read the rest of this entry »

More and more search engines are now offering image search options. These image searches can provide some nice extra traffic. Optimizing your site for image searches can be fast, easy and done correctly very effective.

The first key to optimizing your site for image searches is to determine the proper keywords and keyword phrases to describe your images then placing those keywords in the image ALT tag. Read the rest of this entry »

When you are building a site that you want to optimize for good search engine rankings one thing you will want to strive to avoid is duplicate content. Duplicate content is where more than one website has the exact same content on it. Anyone who has searched for something on the Internet has run across this. You type in the search engine term you want into the search engine and it brings back the top sites and half of them have the exact same stuff on it. Search engines like Google are trying hard to get rid of that type of problem so they have started to penalize sites that use duplicate content. Read the rest of this entry »

How you build your sites can actually be a factor in how well they get ranked in search engines. If you have a large site with many pages or a site that is made up of many graphics or Flash it can be difficult for search engines to spider and index all of your pages. This makes planning your site architecture for search engines important. Read the rest of this entry »

When search engines like Google and Yahoo index your site they use many different criteria in determining what keywords your site should rank well for. One of the more important criteria is the use of your keywords or keyword phrases in the body text of your web site. If you want to rank well for a certain phrase or word you need to have that phrase or word appear throughout the site. You don’t want to overdo it, but you need to be diligent about putting the keywords or keyword phrases where applicable in the body text of your site. Read the rest of this entry »

Using the various heading tags in your html can be a very helpful tool for organizing your site and it can also have some big effects on search engine ranking. The exact effect on search engine ranking seems to be a debatable topic but many experts agree that it is a very important tool and Thomas Bindl actually wrote that it is the, “2nd most important on-page criteria.” Russ Jones adds that heading tags are, “In my opinion, the second most important HTML tag available.” Read the rest of this entry »

The description meta tag while not nearly as important for actual search engine rankings as the Title Tag the description tag on your website’s pages can dramatically improve the amount of people that actually click the link to your site that appears in the search engine rankings. When someone does a keyword search in many search engines and/or directories they will see the title of your site then below that is the description of your site taken from the description tag you place on your site itself. This description is your opportunity to sell your site to the visitor. Read the rest of this entry »

Having your website’s keywords in its domain name can be a nice advantage for your site. If no other ranking reasons existed the fact that search engines like Google and Yahoo bold the keywords people searched for when they list the results should be reason enough to strongly consider this factor when getting a domain name. Read the rest of this entry »

If you only do one thing to your website to help optimize it for search engines that one thing should be giving your site a descriptive, keyword rich title tag. The title tag is the title that displays in the upper left hand corner of the browser when the page loads. It acts as the website’s name and therefore should be accurate, descriptive and include the keywords you are optimizing your site for.

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Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the act of optimizing your sites so that they get good rankings in the search engines. The basic theory of SEO is to choose a keyword or phrase that best describes your site, or a section of your site, and then use various optimization techniques to tweak the site. Done properly when someone goes to a search engine and searches for that keyword or phrase they will find your site. Read the rest of this entry »