Search Engine Optimization positioning

More and more people are wondering about how to search engine optimize websites and articles. SEO will help position your website higher in the search engines, thereby getting you more views. It doesn't take long to learn the basics, but it will be a gradual learning process as you experiment with what works for your topics.

Search engine optimization

It all starts with your topics. After you know what you want to write about you then have to figure out which phrases or keywords people use to find those topics on search engines. To find out what words people use to search, you can start off with Google's keyword tool. Type in the keywords related to your topic and you will find how often it is searched for each month.

Long tail keywords

One keyword, such as tomato, is perhaps more broad of a word than you might consider. People may be searching for tomato recipes, to buy tomato plants or seeds, to learn how to grow tomatoes, or to find nutritional information and health benefits of tomatoes. It is very hard to get on the first page of search results for a single keyword, the competition is massive. If you were to use a long tail keyword, such as “how to grow tomatoes”, you are starting to narrow down your audience, and while there are less people searching for this, you now have a chance at getting on the first page of search results. There is no point in trying to attract people to your page if it's not what they are looking for, as they will immediately leave, and having a high bounce rate could potentially be bad for SEO. It doesn't hurt to use single keywords, but you will want to focus more on the long tail keywords.

SEO Title

SEO starts with the title. Make sure you add a keyword in it. And next you want to have the keywords in your URL, or slugs, for example hubpages.com/how-to-grow-tomatoes. This is extremely important. Then try to put keywords in the first sentence of the paragraph of your article, in the body, and the conclusion.

Keywords work best when used in your articles. Meta tags help but they have less weight than then the keywords in your article. The more words used in the article, the easier and more naturally that those keywords can be used, and this repetition will help with SEO.

Don't worry too much about search engine optimization when first starting out, other than getting the basics. Write your articles but just make sure to be conscious of your keyword usage and you will learn to be more effective over time. If you want to take your skills a lot further learning is really the key to getting the most out of search engine optimization, so it's a good idea to consider purchasing a book on it for those times when you need to take a break from the computer. And you really do need to take breaks from your computer or you will burn out fast.