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. 

Make a number of mini-sites that lead back to your main site. This way, each site can focus on one or two keywords and have a fully functional site that you can optimize and get traffic for, but serves a dual purposes since it will link back to your main website. The more mini-sites you have, the more point to your original site, and that will cause it to rise in the search engine page rankings.

Place links in key places to guarantee they get noticed. They do not need flashing lights around them or obnoxious bold lettering, but it is important to make sure links get noticed. Put them in places that people typically look on a website. This is often near the comments, along the sidebar, or underneath headlines.

Your homepage carries roughly 50 percent of the weight in searches. Up to 5 percent of your copy and links throughout the site should be weighted with keywords and phrases. This density will give depth to searches and bring your site closer to the top rankings on the major engines.

Link to any .edu sites that may be relevant to the content of your site and try to contact those .edu sites to link back to you as well. Search engines place a lot of weight on .edu sites and help your site seem more legitimate, raising your rank on search results pages.

Rather than lose out to more tech-savvy competitors, take this opportunity to consider implementing SEO efforts to enhance your company's online presence. Follow the advice in this article and you will be enabling your business to gain better standings on the major search engine results pages, which will ultimately drive traffic and sales. SEO