Search engine optimization, or SEO, is increasingly important for anyone who wants their website to be noticed. If your site doesn’t show up near the top of the first page of internet search results, you are going to miss out on a lot of visitors. This article will give you some tips on how you can improve your site’s search ranking.

Build an exceptional website. Before you do any SEO to get your website onto the first page of search results, ask yourself honestly whether your website really is one of the best 5 websites in the world on your chosen topic. If you can’t answer that question positively with confidence, then work on improving your website.

To search engine optimize your website, avoid using navigation menus that utilize JavaScript, forms or CSS. These types of navigation menus can’t be crawled by search engine spiders. If you must use one of these types of navigation menus, be sure to duplicate your site navigation, as normal hyperlinks, in the footer of each page.

To make a truly successful website and to increase search engine optimization, you must have unique content on your website. People will be constantly searching for new and unique material. Be sure that you don’t copy it from another source or paraphrase it. That will decrease search engine optimization.

Do you want to rank more highly with the search engines? An efficient search engine optimization strategy is to use the ALT text feature, with any image that you place on your site. This will allow you to place your keywords in as many positions as possible and one extra, can be the ALT text area of an image.

While purchasing a domain name may seem like the right way to go, many search engines do not recommend it. Some search engines have a long delay for adding new sites to their existing lists, and the last thing you want is to delay getting new visitors. Using your existing website is more feasible, since the wait time for some engines is up to a full year.

If you post an image on your site, tag it with the word “image.” Image searching is one of the most popular forms of searches on any search engine. Many a person has found an interesting image on a search engine, and found that it was attached to a site they came to love.

Invest in online advertising like adwords or adbrite. It’ll help you with your traffic and also your SEO, and that’s a big boon to those that go after do-it-yourself SEO. Such advertising conduits are meant to do just that. If this product is associated with Google, your hits will increase a ton.

Using image maps for website navigation is a bad idea for webmasters looking to optimize search engine performance. While there are ways to link images to keywords for SEO, when it comes to a navigation menu, an image cannot provide more than a tiny fraction of the SEO power offered by a well-tweaked text menu.

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.

To maximize the effect of your photo ALT descriptions, include specific keywords like image or picture. Many people using image searches use one of these two keywords. Taking advantage of that will give your picture a higher ranking and bring you even more image search traffic. Try to vary what keywords you use to attract traffic from a variety of sources.

The coding of your site should be streamlined in such a way that major search engines’ spiders are able to easily and quickly find your page. SEO ensures that spiders are able to determine what your site is about, which then allows them to assign a relevancy score relative to other sites. To create a more defined site, use CSS, or a cascading style sheet.

By now you have learned that improving your site’s search ranking doesn’t require secret insider knowledge or genius-level coding skills. Instead, by following a few simple principles, you’ll be able to boost your site’s visibility and attract more traffic than you ever dreamed you could. Just use these techniques and watch your traffic soar!