While a query on a search engine usually turns up thousands of matches, most of us only ever see the most relevant matches on the first page – the first ten or so. That’s why so many people want to be in the top results for their niche. SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the best ways to do this, but you have to be careful. Taking the wrong tactics could result in your page getting blacklisted, not pushed up in the rankings. Let’s look at a few tips for SEO in your website.

 

The first step is thinking about how people will search for your page. These words are your target keywords, and they’ll vary according to the pages in your site. Make sure they’re two to three words long, or even more. Overly short keywords will be in for a lot of competition from other relevant sites. One of the most important parts of SEO is making certain that you’re targeting the right niche. Watch for keywords that are too long, too – they can be hard to optimize for. Real people, as well as computers, will need to read the content on your page.

 

Don’t go in blind with your keywords. Once you’ve determined which keywords you want, look at the competition. See what sites come up for the keywords that you prefer, and make sure that you’re not competing against the wrong companies or sites. If you’ve chosen a niche that’s already dominated by a large company that will be hard to shift, you might just want to get a new keyword.

 

Positioning your words is going to be an important part of optimization. Use the keywords you want to rank for in the HTML title tag of your page. This is one of the biggest reasons that many sites are poorly ranked. Don’t stuff your title, however. Keep it short and readable, and make sure you use a new, relevant one for each page. It may help to think about your titles like headlines in a newspaper – you want them to communicate the basics of the page right away. Avoid starting the page with throwaway words like “A” and “The”, since they’ll make it more difficult for visitors to file their bookmarks.

 

Put keywords high on the page, and pay attention to your layouts. Use target keywords in the headline and the first few paragraphs of your webpage. If you’re using tables as a layout method (this is outdated, but some people still do) be sure to look to see if they’re pushing your content further down the page. Search engines will read the table information first, and assume that the keywords are less relevant. The simpler your structure is, the better your page will look to the search engines. You’ll have the same problem with lots of JavaScript at the beginning of the page.

 

Have all keywords show up in the text. Never try to use irrelevant keywords for your page titles – your words need to reflect the page content as well. This also means you need to avoid presenting large sections of text graphically. Making your content into a graphic may be pretty, but it doesn’t do a lot for your ranking. The search engines can’t read an image, after all. You may be able to inlcude information in the ALT tag, but it’s safer to use HTML text whenever possible. It keeps your page more readable to humans and to search engines alike.

 

Don’t confuse the search engines. In addition to avoiding graphical content, there are a few other things to steer clear of if you want to be well indexed. Image maps, videos, and other information shouldn’t used unless absolutely necessary. Pretend the search engine is viewing your site with a very old web browser, and try to focus on the things that browser would be able to see. Avoid frames and other techniques that are confusing to the search engines. After all, just because a human can understand it doesn’t mean a computer can.

 

Don’t try spamming. Stuffing lots of keywords into your content, putting HTML text full of keywords where people can’t see it, and other schemes are going to keep your page from being indexed. That means that you’ll actually end up with a lower ranking than you should. Most search engines are getting smarter about how often a real article includes a keyword, and will treat you less favorably if you try to cheat.

 

Expand your references. Instead of sticking to just one form of the keyword, modify it to use variations that mean the same thing. This makes the same page turn up for a variety of different searches and increases the relevance of the page, too. This reinforces your keywords in a natural, legitimate way – after all, people don’t use the same form of a phrase every time they say it. These methods will help you get the most out of your SEO.