With so many online businesses competing for the consumers time and money, failure to properly utilize search engine optimization (SEO) in online efforts can easily spell doom for a company's online operations. This selection of handpicked SEO tips and tricks will offer guidance on using SEO to drive traffic, sales volume and increase exposure.

A way to bring your website to the top of a list in a search engine is to promote your website or product on various aggregator websites such as Digg, Fark, Reddit, or StumbleUpon. The more prominent linkages you can create through websites such as these will provide more credibility to your website. This will in turn provide the search bots more evidence that your website it valuable and worth putting near the top.

In order to know if your efforts to optimize your site's appearance in web search results, it is important to monitor your page rank, which can be done with the Google toolbar. It is also important to monitor what keywords your visitors are entering in their search to find your site.

When you are deciding what phrases to use throughout your site, use this quick Google test to see if your page has ecommerce SEO of being a "top result." Search each of your potential key-phrases (in quotation marks) individually. Choose the key-phrase that retrieves the least amount of results. This way, you will have less competition within your search result pool.

The domain name that you choose should be easy for your customers to recall, and closely related to the type of merchandise that you offer. Memorable domain names that are easy to pronounce are advantageous for Internet users who locate your content through YouTube.

To reach your SEO goals, use meta description tags to describe every page on your website. These description tags will provide a short blurb about your website or the page to the search engine. It is important to keep your meta tags short and sweet because the search engines only read a certain number of words in it anyway. This can attract more readers to your website, even if your site wasn't at the top of the search results.

Distinguish your post titles using H1 tags. To Google and other search engines, H1 tags are the signal that the marked copy is the page's title. Make sure the words in your H1 tagged title also appear in your story, as search engines will inspect the body copy to make sure the title and the post content are consistent with each other.

To demonstrate the importance of a keyword to search engines, bold it on its first use. Search engines are able to recognize when text is bolder, and rate bolder words 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.

Search engines crawl your entire site by default so you should include a robots.txt file to exclude pages that are not relevant to your site topic. Write the file and upload it to the root directory of the site. This will tell the search engine what to ignore right away so it doesn't waste time going through info that is not important.

Make the most of your affiliate marketing business by familiarizing yourself with SEO techniques. In order to achieve success, you have to make it easy for potential customers to find your website. Take the time to learn about anchor text, external linking, social bookmarking, article exchanges and other effective SEO methods.

Use keywords effectively for search engine optimization by striking a balance between too few key words and too many keywords. Keywords should appear in the title, in your content and also in your image names. Beware of putting an overly large number of keywords all over your site to avoid having a search engine think of you as a spammer.

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.

Use a keyword checking tool to make sure the keywords you want to be prevalent on your page are the ones the search engines will be finding. Sometimes you don't realize how often other common words are being repeated in the other text on your page, like advertising or navigation links.

If you are entering those times when strategies just aren't proving powerful, these great tips could provide great inspiration to insure that you are getting the best possible results that are out there for you. You want your audience to find you as easily as possible, so make sure you are always formulating strategies for success.