Before Embarking On Your SEO Efforts, Read These Tips

Once the hard work of making a website is over, the hard work of submitting it to the search engines and having it show up in the results begins. Maybe you think you have to have a computer science degree to do it, but this article will show you some practical advice on how even you, can make your website stand out.

Make sure your website is modern and up-to-date for search engine optimization. An old fashioned looking website will turn visitors off right away. You want to be sure your visitors stay on your page for at least a minute so they will have time to absorb your information and become curious enough to click a few links to find out more.

When setting up your search engine optimization efforts, don't over-estimate the power of keyword Meta tags. Meta tags used to be very important in raising your search engine rankings, but most of today's search engines no longer use them. However - the description Meta tags use - is much more important because it shows up under your site link in a search engine results and will draw visitors into your site.

When coming up with keyword terms to search engine optimize your blog or site, shorter isn't necessarily sweeter. Data indicates that a majority of searches are done using more than one word. Find ways to expand your keyword terms so that you're including short, relevant phrases of two or three words.

To make your website's linking structure give you good search engine results, avoid deep linking hierarchies, unless you are comfortable with your low-level pages performing poorly on the results pages. Deep linking means using many nested sub-directories to organize your content. Search engines are unlikely to burrow more than two or three sub-directories deep, so make sure pages at that depth are not page that you want to optimize for the search engines.

When titling your website files and setting their URLs, use hyphens rather than underscores to separate words. (e.g. "my-homepage" rather than "my_homepage") Using hyphens lets search engines read separate keywords when they index your site. Underscored titles will appear to search engines as one long keyword - and that keyword is not likely to be a search term.

Make sure to submit your site to search engines for ranking after you go to the effort of optimizing it. The search engine can't rank something it doesn't know about. All of that effort will be wasted if the search engine doesn't know your site exists. Most search engines today use spiders, but submitting the site yourself will speed up the ranking process.

Audit click through patterns to see how your customers end up buying (or not). There is software that will track every click visitors make. If you see that a certain page is leading many customers to a purchase, consider making it more prominent on your site and using similar language on other pages of your site.

So there you have it. Nothing but ideas. If you put this information to work and use the tips and tricks that have been provided here to you, you should see results in your search engine optimization goals. The benefits are well worth all the effort and research you may need to do.