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

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 verify it’s there by going to the URL. But if you’re the only one doing that, the information you published is not getting out.

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? It is not accidental that you found 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 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.

To start the series, we’ll cover the process needed to craft search engines marketing articles:

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. There are no guidelines for specific locations within the text for the keyword to appear, except that you should try to get it in the first 50 words that appear in the article, including the title. 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. 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. 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″). So, we made sure 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).