Bruce Clay

Effective SEO (search engine optimization) is critical for any business that has a website. You want your business’s website to show up on that first page when people search for what you’re selling, and that’s where SEO comes into play. Here you’ll find the key components of a website that should be crafted with care to help a web page rank, the server status codes that help or hinder SEO, and advanced search operators that will have you searching the web like a pro.

Google Analytics is free software that helps website owners understand what’s going on with their online business. Besides collecting and analyzing data, you can set SEO goals — specific actions that you want website visitors to take. As you see how well those goals are being met, you can evaluate how effective your site is and make improvements as needed.

You may want to employ some seasonal keywords as part of your SEO strategy. Some keywords retain their popularity and relevance throughout the year, like [Ford Mustang] or [California]. Others see rises and spikes throughout the year due to seasonal trends. Holidays are a good example. More people buy Christmas tree ornaments in December than in July, and the majority of costume sales happen before Halloween.

To include a video on your website, the SEO best practice is to embed it within the applicable page. Don’t show it in a pop-up window where it’s isolated from the text describing it, because you want the spiders to see the video as part of the current page. Placing videos where they count most Many sites move videos into separate windows with no title or text, but this is a lost opportunity from an SEO perspective.

Domain names are an important part of your SEO strategy. If you don’t yet have a website domain name registered, you may be surprised to learn that you have a lot of options open to you besides ending your website name with .com. First, a little lesson in domain name anatomy. A URL is made up of several parts: You’re probably most familiar with the following top-level domains (TLDs): .

Search engine optimization (SEO) requires some technical knowledge about how search engines work and how to research what makes sites rank and find out how your competitor sites are successful. The advanced search operators in this table show you how to filter search engine results to find just the information you’re looking for, including limiting your results to just a single site or getting back results where your keyword is used in a page title or URL.

Your hard work on search engine optimization (SEO) won’t matter if your server isn’t set up to properly deliver pages and codes to search engines and your customers. You have to keep your server happy and healthy. Use this table to diagnose server problems, sort out redirects, and ensure that everything is working as it should, and you’ll minimize SEO problems.

Some elements that are important for search engine optimization (SEO) are fairly well hidden in the HTML (programming code) of a page. Sure, you can see a web page’s source code by choosing View Source on each page individually, but that’s time consuming. A tool that can pick out just the important SEO elements and display them together, even for multiple pages simultaneously, is much more efficient!