SEO Defined

SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, involves selecting the most suitable keywords and/or keyword phrases for your blog posts or articles, as this will help your websites rank higher in search engines. When Internet users look up certain words or phrases, your Search Engine Optimized websites are more likely to be among the higher ranked sites.

There are other ways to ensure that your websites are search engine optimized, such as manipulating the HTML code and choosing your meta gags well. In addition, and perhaps most important of all, you will want to work on building high quality backlinks not only to the main home page of your website, but also to the internal pages (blog posts, articles, etc.) of your website. All of these are factors in how highly ranked your site (or hub or article) will be.

Article marketing can be of assistance when building backlinks. For instance, you will probably want to create between two and five (some would argue even more) EzineArticles linked back to your website or blog. (EzineArticles.com allows you to include two links to your sites, not in the body of the articles, but in the customized signature that appears at the end of your articles. These links need to be written in the form of anchor text rather than hyperlinked if they are to work properly.) Including promotional articles in other article directories (in addition to EzineArticles.com is also a good idea.

You can also use the social networking sites to build buzz about your sites. StumbleUpon, DIGG, MIXX, folk’d are a few of the sites you may want to include in your backlinking efforts. Keep in mind that the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) use different factors when determining where to rank a given site, and they can change their algorithms at any time and without notice, so you may need to keep tweaking your site and adding backlinks to keep it afloat in the search engines.

Also remember that SEO (much like the Internet itself) is a relatively new and ever changing field, so if you are serious about keeping your sites well ranked, you will need to keep reading up on the constant changes that are always going on in the Search Engine Optimization field. Above all, make sure that the content in your sites is useful to readers, because people will only visit (and stick around) on your sites if the actual content is worth reading (and is not just a series of keywords strung together to appeal to search engines).