SEO tips that will help increase traffic on your website

Any webmaster or website designer can tell you that one of the hardest parts of establishing and maintaining a successful online presence is the challenge of drawing in traffic to your site. Of course you’ll want to make sure that your site is seen by as many people as possible; but you’ll also want any visitors to actually read your content, click on your advertisements and sponsors, and perhaps even buy your product or services. If you design your webpage with proper search engine optimization (SEO) strategies in mind, you can maximize your exposure to a valid audience that will actually be able to benefit from your website.

If you are serious about competing online in the 21st century, you’ll need to know exactly what SEO is, and how to properly integrate such techniques into your website design. Search engine optimization is simply the art (and it is an art form, believe it or not) of creating web content in a way that will make it easy to find in today’s major search engines, which now consist of millions of websites. With all of this competition, how can you make sure that your website gets noticed?

The repetition of certain keywords or key phrases. Repetition works, especially when it comes to search engine optimization. The relevancy of your content to the actual words or phrases that a user is searching for online determines exactly where your site will be placed within the search results, and obviously a higher spot on this list is going to get your site noticed more than a site that is at the bottom of the search results.

Avoid overusing your keywords and key phrases. Search engine’s are smart enough to know when keyword positioning does not make sense (keyword stuffing) and will penalize you for it. While it is important to repeat keywords several times, you will want to avoid using the exact same word or phrase too often. Besides the effect on your search engine positioning this will also clutter up your website, make it look generic, and ultimately turn users away from your site. Remember, the trick to proper search engine optimization is to provide your potential web users with genuine, high quality content that can be easily found, without having your material come off as being mass-produced or sounding like it was written by a robot.

Use additional or secondary keywords that are similar to your main keywords. Again, you’ll want to repeat these secondary keywords several times in any content you develop, but make sure that these additional words are still relevant to your original keywords and your web content in general. Sometimes, savvy SEO specialists may even include common misspellings of words in order to better maximize a website’s exposure.

Use alt tags on images whenever possible. Again, you’ll want to make sure to avoid overusing images, but placing pictures in strategic locations on your website can have an enormous impact on your site’s productivity. Considering a search engine is a computer system, and not an actual human reading through your website, it is important to give the search engine a description that references an images content. While indexing your websites content, a search engine will read alt tags and gather information / keywords for an image which they normally wouldn’t notice. Additionally, there are even some online search engines that specialize in locating websites through the images they use. In addition, make sure your images are named using keywords for the content they contain.

As you can probably tell by now, SEO can be quite overwhelming to the ordinary computer user – and this article only touches on the tip of the iceberg. But this is why the job of the SEO specialist has quickly become one of the most important and highly-desirable jobs in the computer/IT sector; and as even more websites are established on the World Wide Web, search engine optimization skills are only going to become even more crucial to the success of any website now and well into the future.