Important SEO strategy you should know when building your sites

Google is a household name in many countries, and when you need some information people will be quick to tell you to, "Google it." If you have a website and you don't see it in Google, then you need to do something about it. The internet holds more information than any other one of man's inventions, so this calls for a complex yet easy to navigate structure. Search engines have achieved this and in the process have become one of the most important online resources for people. Learning to optimize your site will increase your search engine position and put you in front of more people. SEO or search engine optimization is a lifesaver for those of us who don't have a huge budget to pay experts to advertise our sites for us. However, many people don't really get SEO and end up doing the wrong things. This article will introduce you to some basic SEO pitfalls to stay away from.

Using graphics and images can be a great way to enhance any website, but putting too many up will actually be damaging your SEO efforts. Having a high number of images on your website will leave less room for search engine friendly content, which will lead to a lower ranking. If your text appears within images, it's going to reduce the impact plain text on your site can have. Search engines can't read the text you have showing on your images, which makes them worthless for SEO purposes. Of course, some graphics are a good idea, so be sure you enter your niche's keywords within the ALT tags for each image displayed. Search engines are able to read the ALT tags attributed to images and graphics, which can give your rankings a bit of a boost. Consider how long your site takes to load within a browser, as this can matter to your visitors as well as to the search engines. When you have a lot of coding on your website, your page loads a lot more slowly, which isn't liked by Google. If possible, replace some of your internal code with an external CSS file. When you use external CSS files, your page loading times can improve and become much smoother. Remember that search engines aim to offer their own users the best possible results to suit their needs, so your aim is to find ways to appeal to what the search engines want. In essence, this can mean your site needs to match what your visitors are looking for and also needs to fit within what the search engines are looking for.

Never listen to SEO practitioners who tout SEO techniques that don't use good ethics. You will find that companies offering SEO services are all over the place these days. You'll only want to use the companies that use whitehat SEO methods, and stay away from the companies that don't. The thing is that you won't even know until your site is banished from the searches. Therefore, if you want to hire a person or company for their SEO abilities, work only with those people who are reputable and will update you often on the results. The more they reveal to you the better they'll be.