It is hard for most people to understand SEO. But not for Neal Walters, head Dallas SEO Guru at http://IrvingSeoExpert.com. There are lots of factors which influence the success of SEO, as well as many sources which claim to be helpful.  Neal is even publishing his first book on the subject  This article will go over what you need to know about SEO so that you can do well all on your own.

Make sure you know how experienced your potential SEO guru is. Prior to making any decisions, understand the risks that are involved.  They may not tell you their secrets, but make sure they have a good reputation their LinkedIn SEO site.

Do you remember the days before Google and Yahoo?  Maybe you used Alta Vista.  Since SEO is well over a decade old, a lot of the process has been automated around the web. You can check out a service like Google Webmaster Tools, which can easily handle much of the SEO work for your website or blog. Google wants you to be successful, because your earnings are their earnings. Therefore, you can trust their tools to do a good job for you.

To demonstrate the importance of a keyword to search engines, make it bold (emphasis) or put it in a heading on its first use in your article or blog post.  Actually, putting it in the title is even better. Search engines are able to recognize when text is either bold or in a heading, and rate bolder words (or higher number headings) as being more important to your page. Having a bold word will help search engines to find your keyword and to look for additional appearances of it on your page.

In order to see if your SEO efforts are working, check where you stand in search engine rankings. There are many programs and tools that do this, like Google Toolbar and Alexa. If you don’t, you might be wasting your time assuming that your SEO is working while it isn’t.  Most SEO firms will track your results for you, as they need to prove that what you are paying them for is actually working.

Use a search engine to your advantage. Find the top ten best rated and most used article directories, and start out by only submitting to those. This will help you keep your focus, and also put you higher on the submission lists for the search engines. You should only associate with reputable companies.  Again, check their references.

Write the text of your web site in plain language. Do not write a long, unintelligible list of keywords, because search engines will recognize this. The search engine will notice that each keyword is surrounded by many other keywords and it will downgrade the importance of each keyword in the list.

Remember to search engine optimize your articles before publishing them. By including keywords in the title and body of an article on your website, you can increase your website’s search engine results page rank. The higher your website’s page rank, the more targeted, organic visitors you will get to your website.

To get the most out of your articles, make them rich in relevant keywords. By including the keywords that are relevant to the topic of your articles, the search engines will able to find them easier. This will make it simple for people to find your content. Your focused keyword should be repeated several times in the article’s text, and in its summary and title, too.

A search engine should be thought of as a machine. Just like a machine there are many different things one can do to optimize the performance one receives out of it. By knowing the most one possibly can about their machine or search engine they can proceed to optimize its performance.

Having a blog on your company website increases its search engine ratings because it makes the website competitive outside of its product keyword areas. Your company may have very strong keywords on every page, but so do other companies that sell the same product. Adding a blog opens up a whole new world of keywords because the content is not so structured.

If you are selecting a company or professional to help you with your SEO efforts, don’t accept any unsolicited offers, especially through email. Unsolicited email offers for help with your search engine optimization is more likely to be a scam than any legitimate company. Just like in the off-line world, businesses advertise for you to go to them and not the other way around.

Optimize your titles too! Don’t forget to add your keywords or keyword phrase into your page’s title. This is also important for blog posts. Search engines look at the titles as well as content, and you have a better chance of ranking higher when the search engine sees title words that fit with the context of the page content.

You should keep the main pages for each section of your website in the main root folder of your server. That keeps them available to the spider immediately, as opposed to burying them in directory folders. The rest of the pages can be put into folders, though, which is good for organization.

A contest or giveaway can be a great idea to drive new traffic to your website. Be sure to research the relevant laws where you live, though. Check out similar promotions on other website to see the way they handle their rules and terms, then adapt them to suit your purposes.

There is a lot involved in search engine optimization, so you need to know what to believe and what to reject. Using the advice here can greatly help your efforts with SEO.