Basics of Keywords and Successful SEO

SEO, is Search Engine Optimization, which is an extremely valuable tool used in
successful online businesses /high traffic web-sites.

To get straight to the point, SEO is simply developing your website in such a way that the search engines will display your site whenever someone does an internet search with specific “keywords” that are craftily sprinkled throughout your web-site. With the millions of websites out there, it can be very difficult keeping up with the competition --so that your web-site is displayed at the top of a search, or simply the first two pages of the search results.

I will outline a few things you can do when optimizing your site for to gain
favorable outcomes from search engines.

Firstly, there are different search engines that your target audience may use to find information on/ road to your web-site. We will point to the top three search sites, that you should work on in trying to optimize your web-site;  MSN, Yahoo, and Google.  

It is apparent that everyone would love to be at the top of the heap, moreover  at the top of a Google search listings, but it's more practical to start with MSN and Yahoo, simply because it's usually quicker to get indexed plus you’ll can still get a significant amount of website traffic from these search engines. Yes you can generate a bit more traffic using  Google, but it's a little trickier with a lot more competition there.

The next thing you want to do is to both create and generate “keywords” for your website. I suggest a keyword planning tool such as Google’s AdWords tool http://www.googlekeywordtool.com/.  Your keywords will be the words that you think your target audience will use to locate you/your product in an internet searches. This maybe harder than it sounds because you have to be careful to choose the right keywords and word phrases as your goal is to beat out the competition.

The way to find the best keywords to use on your site is to use a keyword research tool that displays the number of times per month your chosen keyword/word phrase is searched on the three major search engines. You may initially think that the more a term is searched, the more traffic you will get, but think again! The more a term is searched, the harder it will be to get your site ranked in the top few search results, or the first few pages of search results. The key here is to choose terms that are less popular, but still have a significant number of searches. A good number to aim for is any term that is searched about 5000-10000 times per month. It's pretty difficult to do this without using a keyword research tool, such as Good Keywords (see link above).

Once you've found a good batch of keywords, you want to go into the source code for your web-site and add those keywords to your HTML code. Note please, the best places to put your keywords are in the title tag, H1 and H2 header tags, the description tag, and then sprinkled throughout the text on your web-site.

Keyword density is an important factor that the search engines take into consideration when listing pages in the search results. While you want to repeat your keywords throughout your text, you also want to be careful not to overload your pages with the same keywords to make it obvious that you're just trying to get ahead in the search engine listings. If you try this, you risk getting your site banned, so try to maintain a relatively high keyword density, but not an extraordinary obvious one.

Now that you have your site sprinkled with enough good keywords, it's time to write articles on topics related to your keywords. Use the keywords from the batch that you’ve so carefully generate in your article title, the first paragraph, within the body of the text, and in the conclusion, again not in an obvious way as subtlety is key here.

There is no better way to get traffic to your site, links pointing back to your site, and the search engines to visit your site than by writing a good quality, original article with your search “keyword” terms embedded throughout. These are the basics of keywords and successful SEO!

Good luck with that!