Search Engine Optimization Is Easy When You Read This Article

A website you build might look really flashy and pack in a lot of features, but ask yourself an honest question here: What good are all those bells and whistles doing if nobody's even visiting your site? This is the problem you're going to have unless you address the issue of SEO, so bone up on your skills.

In order to know if your efforts to optimize your site's appearance in web search results, it is important to monitor your page rank, which can be done with the Google toolbar. It is also important to monitor what keywords your visitors are entering in their search to find your site.

If your site has a defined set of categories, optimize the URLs on your site to contain the keywords associated with the categories. Say you have two categories, cats and dogs. Google likes it better if the URLs for such a site are mysite.com/cats and mysite.com/dogs as opposed to something like mysite.com?category=1. Even more importantly, people searching for a keyword associated with one of the categories are more likely to arrive at one of your subpages when you use a logical URL structure.

Be true to yourself and true to your readers. If you are putting content on your site that links to a product or service you don't actually believe in, or that just brings you money, savvy people will see that greed and not want to come back to your site. Worse yet they will stop referring others to you.

When you have determined which popular search engine terms to use, be sure to place them in your HTML title tag. You should do this because search engines give title tag content the most weight out of any of the other elements found on the page. Also use these phrases in title, tags, and description of your videos that you post on video sharing sites.
SEO
When setting up your site with SEO, be aware of how search engine spiders view your page. For example, while using images for navigation links may look attractive to human viewers, it will hurt your search engine rankings. Your rankings, and your reputation for users with accessibility issues, will be increased if you use primarily text or at least provide a text alternative for image links.

Make sure your site is great. The best SEO in the world can bring people to your page, but it won't keep them there. Building a quality site will keep your site at the top of the heap. If you can't say that your site is good enough to be on the first page of results then you have some work to do.

You have to fully commit yourself to search engine optimization in order to succeed. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing so tactics that were successful 6 months ago may be redundant today. SEO requires you to create a long-term plan, regularly educate yourself about new changes and make appropriate adjustments to your methods.

Even though you want to search engine optimize your website, write for readers first and search engine bots second. Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc., now have some very intelligent bots crawling the internet, but bots don't buy goods in online stores, sign up for newsletters or inquire about your services. Humans visits have the potential to do all of those things, so while you need to include keywords in your text for SEO, keep the page readable.

Effective SEO tactics will not require a high level of skill or even a whole lot of effort. What's important is that you take the right approach. As you learn about SEO, you will find that a few minor tweaks can equate to big results. Get started on your optimization by using what you've learned here.