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? You can go to the URL and see it to verify it’s there. But the information you published is not getting out if you’re the only one doing that.

As a reader of this SEO 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 you can do yourself with some basic knowledge of Web interfaces and software.

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 SEO articles:

Determine the “keyword phrase” for which you want to optimize the article. As people search the World Wide Web, the keyword phrase is the equivalent of their search phrase. For best optimization results, the exact keyword phrase needs to appear at least once in the article 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 “SEO article,” and therefore the phrase appears at least six times in this article because the article has more than 500 words. Make sure that you have a ratio of at least 1 percent, or one keyword for every 100 words. 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. This article consists of more than 500 words. 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 SEO article. 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.

In the next SEO article (a bonus keyword phrase occurrence), we’ll examine the importance of using hyperlinks within the article to SEO other Web sites that are important to you.

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