Success on the Internet begins and ends with 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 go to the URL and see it to verify it’s 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. How do we know? For one, it’s no accident that you found this article. It has been engineered, crafted and optimized so that it will show up in places on the World Wide Web where 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 you can perform yourself if you have some basic knowledge of how Web pages are constructed.
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.
We’ll start with the steps necessary to SEO articles for search engines marketing:
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. 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. You need a ratio of at least one instance of the keyword phrase for every 100 words, or about 1 percent. 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.
Recommendation: Use the word count tool on your word processor to accurately count the number of words in your article. When done, check the number of words. In the case of this article, it was 526. 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). So, we made sure there were at least six instances of the phrase search engines marketing (including the title). One or two more wouldn’t hurt, but you don’t want to make your content read comically or unintelligibly to do so.
In the next search engines marketing (a bonus keyword phrase occurrence)SEO article, we’ll examine the importance of using hyperlinks within the article to SEO other Web sites that are important to you.
