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.

You want to optimize any videos you have on your site for SEO. Video enriches your website by offering media content that search engines and users are increasingly looking for. For quick reference, here’s a summary of the best practices for mixing in video: Placement: Embed the video on the page it relates to, rather than in a separate window.

You will need to consider link equity as part of your SEO strategy. Part of the search engine algorithm (how search engines rank your site) is measuring your link equity to see whether you’re an expert on your subject. In broad terms, more links equals greater expertise, especially when the links are from expert sites that are relevant to your site.

Here, you discover how the rest of the world searches the web by discussing several internationally popular search engines. First up is Google. This image shows the French, Japanese, and Brazilian versions of the site. .com" width="535"/>Google has sites for many international markets besides the flagship .com address.

One way to check the status of your server for SEO is to run a quick diagnostic utility called a Check Server tool. This utility attempts to crawl your site the same way that a search engine spider does. If the Check Server tool runs into any obstacles that could prevent the spider from indexing your site, it tells you about them on a report that the utility creates.

Making your site mobile optimized means thinking about the factors that can help your site rank higher in search engine results pages — such as making sure that you’re using keywords, optimizing for local search, and granting search engine spiders access to your content. Keep reading to discover several mobile-specific tactics that might improve your site’s mobile search engine results rank.

If you use a hosted e-commerce site, you want to make sure you employ SEO techniques to get noticed. Many service providers make it easy for people use to set up an e-commerce storefront quickly. Online options for proprietors range from joining an online marketplace (like Etsy for retailers and Fiverr for those offering creative services) to building your own website.

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.