THIS is the Search Engines Marketing Article You’ve Been Looking For

Success on the Internet and traffic go hand in hand. For your Web site, blog, e-mail or advertisement to generate any response or activity, people need to see it.

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 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. 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 Web sites, Web pages and articles. 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.

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 seek information on the Internet, the keyword phrase is the word or words that people will be using for their search. 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. 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.

We suggest using your word processor’s word count tool to get an accurate number of words in the article. 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″). Applying that guideline to this article, we made sure that there were at least six instances of the phrase search engines marketing, including the title. It wouldn’t hurt to have one or two more, because it’s much better to have one or two more than needed than it is to have one or two less.

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).