Using search engine optimization tactics is an ever-evolving art and there are literally hundreds of techniques that webmasters employ to get the best results. When working on boosting your site’s rankings, you may neglect to focus in particular on individual pages and can miss valuable traffic by not optimizing on a page-by-page basis. If you are aware of some basic page optimization tactics and can implement them into all of your pages, your overall site ranking will improve as will the rankings for each individual page. The following outlines a few simple tricks that should be used for each one of your site’s pages.

Getting the Links Out

One of the main ways that Google and other search engines analyze and rank your pages is by the number of links on the page and the number of links from other sites directing to your page. One of the best ways to find quality backlinks for your site is by searching for specialty directories. If your site pertains to starting a small business, then a small business directory would be an excellent place to begin acquiring links. It is also important to make sure that each page is linked to the main page or another page that is linked to the main page; if there is no path to the page, search engines cannot find it!

Optimize Images

When you deviate from standard text, search engines have a more difficult time of locating and classifying your content. For any images on the site, you will want to make sure that you use alt tags to label and categorize them. This allows search engine bots to “read” your images and index them, while also giving you yet another opportunity to squeeze in your keywords for even greater optimization. When using graphics and search engine optimization, it is better to employ traditional imagery as opposed to Flash and Java, which is impossible for search engines to index.

Use Social Networking

One of the best ways to attract new visitors and gain reputation is through the use of social networks. Make sure your website has a Facebook page and periodically post updates with a link to the particular web page. You can also increase your traffic by taking out ads on many of these sites and the tools available to you can facilitate the targeting of virtually any demographic imaginable. There are also social news sites such as Digg that can be useful in promoting a particularly interesting aspect on your web page.

Keep Track of Your Progress

Over the course of weeks and months, you will want to monitor how much your site is improving in search results. Pingler’s Search Engine Position Checker will allow you to check a page’s ranking among search engines using any given phrase. For example, if you are trying to push your page to the top of the search results for ‘top five writing styles’, you would insert that phrase and the URL to see your rankings. Please keep in mind that it can take some time for search rankings to improve, especially in the case of Yahoo/Bing.