Read This Article Before Optimizing Your Website

Search engine optimization (also known as SEO) is a critical part of running any website that is looking to generate more traffic. It is also considered an art that is difficult to master because there are so many different search engines using different search algorithms that you have to account for. However, there are tips and tricks that can help make search engine optimization (http://abc123.com) easier to understand and use. This article aims to share some of these. Joining SEO communities is a great way to learn little insider tricks of the trade. Say Google suddenly changes their policy and begins to treat HTML title tags differently. You may not find out about this until your site falls in the rankings. But if you're signed up to receive newsletters and e-zines from the SEO community, you will always be in the know. Site maps make the website easier to navigate and increases the traffic to your different pages. This results in the pages being linked together. Visitors will utilize the links you have created and this will effectively increase traffic to your site. Be smart with where you place the keywords in your site. Makes sure to place them in aspects of your sites such as titles, URLs, content, image names, etc. Think about what terms your visitors would use to find your content and what they'd expect to see when they arrived. One sure way to increase traffic to your website, is to check the traffic statistics for the most popular search engine keywords that are currently bringing visitors to your site. Use those search words as subjects for your next few posts, as they represent trending topics with proven interest to your visitors. Add a site map if you're trying to get more traffic. All your webpages will receive equal attention. If the side of the website is filled with links, it will bring in more traffic. If site protocol allows, include one link inside the body of the article that leads to information on your site. Scammers steal articles and often post them without making any changes. With a link leading to you placed inside the article, even stolen articles can be of benefit to you. Headings and subheadings are preferred by readers and by search engines alike, so make sure that you always give your article a main title. Also, remember to give each section of the article its own title. This is something that doesn't take long at all. Use videos and a video sitemap to increase the SEO of your website. Videos can be used to introduce yourself or your staff or to demonstrate the use of a product. Post the video on your own website, making sure to label it with effective keywords. After building your video sitemap, use Google Webmaster Tools to submit the URL through your Google Webmaster Central account. Next, post the video on YouTube, Metacafe, Yahoo and other video websites. Then, sit back and wait for your customers to come calling. If you have a competitor whose SEO performance you would like to emulate, find out how many visitors the competitor's site draws from the search engine results pages. If you intend to combat the competitor head-to-head, this gives you a goal for your own efforts. If you simply want to keep pace with the pack, you can use the competitor's traffic as a yardstick The decision to consolidate near-duplicate pages, should be carefully considered, in terms of the number and quality of inbound links, as well as, the popularity associated with each separate page. If you consolidate, it is inevitable that at some point, a former site visitor will now have a broken link to the site that was absorbed. Consequently, you must preserve the page that has been more frequently visited and linked. In conclusion, you learned not only some basics about search engine optimization but also some specific ways in which your can apply it to your own website. As long as you are committed and have a goal to work toward, the tips in this article should help you find success.