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? You can verify it’s there by going to the URL. But the information you published is not getting out if you’re the only one doing that.
As a reader of this search engines marketing article, you likely have an interest in learning how to increase your Internet audience. How do we know? Well, it is not an accident that you came upon this article. People like you who have an interest in this topic are finding it because it has been crafted, optimized and engineered to show up where you 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 you can perform yourself if you have some basic knowledge of how Web pages are constructed.
This series of articles will cover the numerous facets of search engine optimization, and when we’re done, we’ll package them together for you in a step-by-step guide. We invite you to bookmark this site and follow this series in the coming days and weeks.
For this first in the series, we’ll focus on the steps needed to craft search engines marketing articles:
The first step in optimizing any article is choosing the “keyword phrase” for which you want to optimize. As people search the World Wide Web, the keyword phrase is the equivalent of their search phrase. The exact keyword phrase should appear in the article at least once for every 100 words. It doesn’t have to be exactly every 100 words. 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. It is important to be at a minimum of 1 percent, because that is a key measurement in search engine algorithms for the worthiness of the article to be ranked for the keyword.
We recommend getting an accurate count of the number of words in your article by using the word count tool in your word processor. When done, check the number of words. 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).
