If you are aiming to earn money on the web, then SEO is critical to you. If you use the correct tools you can put yourself in the view of many potential customers.

Create unique content on your site to get found. Think about what everyone else is saying in your field and say it in a different, more powerful way. You don’t want to blend in and under your competitors by writing something similar to what they do. You’ll probably never get found that way. Keep your writing fresh.

Make sure you didn’t forget to leave robots.txt set. In many cases, when a site is in development, web designers will use a robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing the site at all. Some of these same web designers forget to remove the robots.txt file when the site goes live. If you know what date your site is going live, one tip is a create a cron job that deletes the robots.txt file automatically on the designated date.

Social media can be a useful tool in search engine optimization. When you write something new, tweet the link, encourage your followers to share the link and post it on social media sites. When a link is attached and sent around Twitter, real-time searches will be more successful for your search engine goals.

Always use SEO-friendly URLs for your websites. If you use keywords in your URLs then your website will show up in a higher position in search results. Remember, hyphens in URLs are treated as spaces, but underscores or not, so for search engine purposes it is preferable to use hyphens in URLs and file names.

If you are using images on your site, incorporate your keywords and phrases into image tags and file names. By doing so, you add weight to the engines and increase your percentage of copy weight greatly. Each image should carry some amount of this phrasing, or it might be a wasted image.

Attract more traffic to your site and boost your search ranking by establishing relationships with other sites. Sharing links with well-respected sites will help raise your profile and bring in more visitors. Be sure to reciprocate by linking back to their site as well, and avoid “link farms” with bad reputations.

When looking to optimize your site for search engines, don’t forget to take a look at the competition. Bring up a Google search and see what keywords your competition is using, and if their site is ranked higher than yours. If you find that you’re not on top, rewrite some of your keywords to give yourself the advantage.

Some owners of websites fail to proofread their content. Make certain that your site is easy to read for both human visitors and search engines. If your content is poorly written and is full of spelling and grammatical errors, your website will not rank well by search engines, if at all.

It should go without saying that one of the keys to search engine optimization is to promote your website. Make great use of all the social networking tools at your disposal and don’t forget to set up a newsletter and RSS feeds to give your visitors new reasons to keep coming back for more.

Avoid guilt by association and check the PageRank of your outbound links on a regular basis. Just like a neighborhood can go bad, so can a website. PageRank will tell you if the site is still considered good. If it’s changed get that link off your page asap.

When crafting your website to maximize traffic through keyword searches, it is important to be as direct, relevant, and specific as possible. Achieving a high search engine rank with a broad term such as “baked goods,” for example, is likely to be much more difficult than doing so with a keyword phrase like “three-layer fudge caramel cake.” Selecting keywords with clarity and precision will help you rise above the search engine competition.

When trying to fully optimize your search engine placement, it is a good idea never to publish the same article or blog post under two or more different URLs on your site. Search engines look specifically for this strategy and penalize heavily for it, so do yourself a favor and keep all URLs, totally original.

You do not have to use the same exact word for your keyword throughout your article. Search engines are optimized to understand that plurals and tenses of your keyword are really the same word. Using this will keep your keyword visible to the search engines, and will make your page much more readable for your audience.

Overall, SEO is essential to success in internet business. Follow the tips that have been given about the procedures and tools that you will need to use to help optimize your site. All in all, you need more than SEO to make a successful website; you actually need a well-designed website to back it up.

Vincent Moore