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 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. You may be asking, how do they know? Well, it is not an accident that you came upon 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.

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 craft search engines marketing articles:

The first step in optimizing any article is choosing the "keyword phrase" for which you want to optimize. 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. The keyword phrase "search engines marketing" appears at least six times in this article because it contains more than 500 words. A ratio of at least 1 percent, or one keyword phrase for every 100 words, is important. The 1 percent is a key measurement in the algorithms search engines use to determine the worthiness of an article to be ranked highly.

We suggest using your word processor's word count tool to get an accurate number of words in the article. When done, check the number of words. More than 500 words are in this article. 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.

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).