If you’re looking to make money with a website or blog, the absolute first thing on your to-do list should be something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO refers to any techniques used to improve your website’s chances of coming up as an earlier result in a search related to your web site. Try these tips to improve your search engine ranking!

To know where you stand with your particular niche market, you should check on your page rank at least once a week. By checking your rank, you will find out varying information about how competitors are finding you and you will also realize what you need to do in order to shoot up in the rankings. Your goal should be a page rank of 1.

Think of all keywords related to your site. Even if you don’t attempt to rank for every keyword you can think of, having a list of related keywords can help search engine results by allowing you to make best use of the keyword tag and by giving you even more possible ways to get visitors.

To encourage searchers to click on your site, make sure that you choose a relevant meta tag for every page of your website. The meta tag is the brief description that appears under your title on the search engine results page, and without it, people may not know what your site is about.

To search engine optimize your website, don’t include more than 150 internal linking hyperlinks on your home page. Too many internal links on one page can dilute a web page’s search engine rank. Huge numbers of links also make it hard for visitors to find the information that they need quickly.

Your website copy should focus on what a human would search for. Trying to beat the engine with repetitive keywords will get you nowhere. The engine is smarter than that. Look for phrases and strings that will be searched for by the normal human. Effectively targeting these types of key phrases will garner more hits.

Write great content for Internet marketing. If the quality is there, then results are sure to follow. You have to give a person a reason to want to keep revisiting your site, and as they continue to come back so will your Internet revenues. You will also see that those people will begin to share your site with others.

Choose your website colors wisely. Different colors put people into different moods. So if your website’s color doesn’t compliment your brand, then you may be creating dissonance in the mind of your viewer. For instance, a brand selling suntan lotion would be smart not to choose a heavy, dark-hued background. A lighter color, more in tune with the outdoors, will put those customers in a better frame of mind.

To increase your website’s search engine traffic, be sure to add new content regularly. Updating your page means that search engines will crawl it more often and that your site will receive a higher page ranking. New content also means new keywords, which will give users more ways to discover your site.

Give your website a theme, and use it accordingly. Giving each of your categories a theme that is relevant to your overall increases you readership, which in turn can raise you up on search lists. Make sure that your theme stays within the trend of whatever you are working with, or else it may have the opposite effect.

When you initially launch your new site, send out a press release to local media who may be interested in covering the story. Even if you already have an established site, do a “remodel” and send out a press release for the new and improved unveiling. You might be surprised by how many publications have space reserved for just these types of stories.

If you have embedded videos on your web site, be sure to include them in your sitemap. Doing so lets the search engines know that your video content is actually part of your web site. This will help bring more traffic to your site, since viewers will be more likely to come to your site to watch your video rather than going to an external hosting site.

A great program to implement in your search engine optimization is the Yahoo! Buzz Index. This tool, as its name suggests, allows you to view how popular or relevant your keywords and keyword phrases are at any given moment in time. This is great for selecting keywords you know people will search for, increasing the traffic for your page.

When trying to optimize search engine results make sure you choose the keywords you META tag with carefully. The right words can be the difference between success and failure. The more likely a person searching will find you using a certain word the better that word is as a keyword choice.

Make a Pay Per Click account. You will have to pay up front for the service, but it will provide you with immediate results in the form of increased visibility to your site. It does this by creating actual search volume for the keywords that you decide on.

If you can afford to, try to stay away from shared server hosting. It can be a very unreliable hosting platform that can damage the work you put into helping your SEO. Maybe try sticking to cloud hosting or virtual private server. If you must use shared hosting, do your research to make sure that it has a positive reputation.

Use a lot of keywords in the file names and URLs that you use. Make sure not to use too many hyphens because it will look like it is leading to a spam site and people will not be too sure about whether or not they want to take a chance and click on it.

With these tips at your disposal, you should now be able to utilize proper SEO to get your website more traffic so you can start making more money off of your website through advertisements or sales. Your business or web site will benefit greatly from the improved search ranking you’ve created.