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Search engine optimization is critical when trying to generate traffic to your website. Whether you're a business owner, a personal blog owner, or just someone with a profession in art that wants to show off your work, optimizing your site to perform well in search rankings, may just be essential to your success. Read the tips below to help you make the most of your efforts:

When you develop SEO pages, it pays to have lots of shorter pieces on related topics instead of a single long one. Long pages don't carry as much weight with the search engines as short ones do. Visitors are also not likely to read an article in its entirety if it is overly long.

Your homepage carries roughly 50 percent of the weight in searches. Up to 5 percent of your copy and links throughout the site should be weighted with keywords and phrases. This density will give depth to searches and bring your site closer to the top rankings on the major engines.

Keep an eye on where your site stands in the search engine results. By knowing this, you will be able to tell if any efforts at raising your ranking are working at all. You can also use your referrer log to see how your visitors are arriving to your site and what search terms they are using.

Don't use hidden text or links on your website to optimize your site for search engines. Some webmasters will try to make text or links invisible to http://worldmap.harvard.edu/maps/8524/info but visible to search engine spiders. One way they do this is to use white text on a white background. Search engines can now easily spot this sort of behavior, so it will not help your site rank at all.




<img src="http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/seo-search-engine-optimization-text-isolated-white-background-48001166.jpg" />

Don't use generic words in your key words list, like &computers& and &books&. This will generate too many results and will most likely, not show your site at the top. Instead, using more specific words and phrases like &buy cheap computers online,& can be less competitive and be more effective for your site.

Write great content for Internet marketing. If the quality is there, then results are sure to follow. You have to give a person a reason to want to keep revisiting your site, and as they continue to come back so will your Internet revenues. You will also see that those people will begin to share your site with others.

Besides making sure to update your website daily, you should be providing fresh links to different websites. If you update your links daily, people will be coming to your website to get the latest links to all the new websites, which will increase search engine optimization.

Do not simply focus on your web copy to carry your keywords. Incorporate your keyword into all aspects of your site. This means being creative in your domain name, folders within the site and individual page names. Keywords in these areas, along with keywords and phrases throughout your copy, greatly increase your chances.

Rather than spamming your new website information everywhere you look, it may be best to allow your website to be found naturally by search engine crawlers. If you allow this to happen, search engines will take a more favorable glance at your site, as it seems that you are working on your content, rather than getting noticed.

Search engine spiders are not big fans of flash based websites. They are extremely hard for them to crawl and using flash can keep you from even being indexed. If you have to use flash, make sure to include alternate text that describes what the flash is showing so that the spiders can crawl it and index your site.

You should always monitor the ranking of your page using programs such as the Google Tool Bar or Alexa. You should also always know what websites the people visiting your website are from. This gives you an idea of what other kind of websites they may be visiting. Perhaps you can advertise there as well.

Hopefully, search engine optimization looks a little less mystical, now. It is just a collection of techniques for boosting a website's traffic and therefore, its potential revenue. Some of them are easy to master, while some take more study and practice. If the tips above whet your appetite, there is plenty more enlightenment waiting for you.