You can’t have success on the Internet without traffic. People need to see your Web site, your blog, your e-mail or your advertisement for it to generate any response or activity.
To paraphrase a philosophical question, if you build the world’s best Web site and nobody sees it, is it really there? Obviously, it is simple to visit the site and verify it is there. But if you’re the only one doing that, the information you published is not getting out.
As someone reading this search engines marketing article, you likely have an interest in learning how to increase your Internet audience. You may be asking, how do they know? Well, it is not an accident that you came upon this article. It has been engineered, crafted and optimized so that it will show up in places on the World Wide Web that people who have an interest in this topic are looking. This practice is commonly known as search engine optimization, or SEO. It is performed on articles, Web pages and Web sites. This article is the first in a series which will shed some light on SEO, which can be a do-it-yourself project, depending on your level of knowledge and expertise.
There are numerous facets to search engine optimization, which we will cover in this series of articles and then package them together in a step-by-step guide when we’ve reached the end. We invite you to bookmark this site and follow this series in the coming days and weeks.
To start the series, we’ll cover the process needed to craft search engines marketing articles:
Determine the “keyword phrase” for which you want to optimize the article. The keyword phrase is the word or words that people will be seeking information on under which your article will appear in search engines and elsewhere. The exact keyword phrase should appear in the article at least once for every 100 words. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it has to appear exactly in the position of every 100th word. This article is optimized for the keyword phrase “search engines marketing,” and therefore the phrase appears at least six times in this article because the article has more than 500 words. A ratio of at least 1 percent, or one keyword phrase for every 100 words, is important. The 1 percent is a key measurement in the algorithms search engines use to determine the worthiness of an article to be ranked highly.
We recommend getting an accurate count of the number of words in your article by using the word count tool in your word processor. Check the number of words in the article when you are finished. In the case of this article, it was more than 500. Always make sure that the number of keyword phrase occurrences is at least one more than the first numeral of the word count (in this case, “5″). Therefore, this article, including the title, contains at least six instances of the phrase search engines marketing. One or two more wouldn’t hurt, but you don’t want to make your content read comically or unintelligibly to do so.
We’ll examine the importance of using hyperlinks within the article to SEO other Web sites that are important to you in the next search engines marketing article (a bonus keyword phrase occurrence).
