Search engines have come a long way since they were first launched. It is hard to imagine now how we would even use the Internet without them, but to maintain their place in our hearts that have to be able to serve up relevant and useful websites in response to our searches. Recognizing the business potential of search engines, online marketers have turned to keyword optimization in order to bring traffic to their websites.
There is a fine line between gaming the search engines to trick them into ranking junk websites higher than they should be, and in using legitimate, search-engine friendly techniques to make our sites as attractive to the SE spiders as we can.
Think for a moment about the last time you searched for a topic on a search engine. Chances are, you, like most people, would have only visited the first few websites that came up as a result of your search. Not a lot of people are willing to scan through every page the search engine regurgitates. Oftentimes, they only look at the first few sites to get what they're looking for.
The websites lucky enough to be at the top of the list are considered as having high page rankings, and these are the sites that get high volumes of free traffic. That is why online marketers want to appear at the top of the list. The greater the traffic, the more chances of successful sales they can make. In order to do so, a lot of them use keyword optimization, as one of the factors search engines use to churn out the results is to match the words a searcher types with the words on the websites, with the best match at the top and the worst at the bottom.
While there may be underhanded techniques (sometimes called black hat strategies) that claim to bring your site traffic, these only have temporary results. Sure, you can find your website at the top of the page rankings, but it will also plummet just as quickly, and because search engines are strict about black hat strategies, you may actually find yourself blacklisted. If that happens it won't much matter how good your content or SEO becomes, the search engine will have you labelled as a junk site. It can take a very long time to repair your site's reputation if that happens.
If you are flagged as a 'bad neighborhood', to coin Google's expression, you might as well start over with a new site altogether.
One of the ways to stay on the righteous path is by good SEO writing. In other words, creating valuable content that isn't just about stuffing your website with as many keywords as you can. That will not only result in unintelligible text, get you banned by the search engines but also it will alienate any human visitors you do manage to attract. Alienated visitors tend not to earn you much cash!
Good SEO can only do so much; even if your website appears at the top of the results, it won't stay long there if the content in the site doesn't have substance. This is why it's called keyword optimization: you will need to use these keywords intelligently so that you will be able to bring natural search engine traffic to your website.
Tips for Keyword Optimization
* Do keyword research. Before you start on keyword optimization, you need to first do some research on what keywords people are using for. Effective keyword research is probably the most important skill any novice Internet marketer can learn. You will be able to know what topics are in demand so you will know what niche to fit into.
You can find keyword research tools on the Internet to help you do so. These tools can help you uncover lists of words and phrases that people are actively searching on in your niche. If you're planning on sticking to a single niche, you can use keywords following a certain theme that are pertinent to the main keyword or topic of your website.
* Use keywords strategically. Some beginners in SEO make the mistake of using their keywords in every other word in their copy. As such, the text is not only garbled and amateurish, but it can also be considered as spamming by search engines. This can quickly lead to penalties. Spread your keywords evenly throughout the copy. The title and the first and last paragraphs should have these. Use these sparingly in the other paragraphs as well, making sure that the flow of the sentences runs smoothly. Keywords can also be placed in the links, meta-tags, and image and video tags. Aim for a page that reads naturally and you won't go far wrong.
* Offer original content. The content that you post should not only go through keyword optimization, it should also be unique and substantial so that site visitors will keep coming back to find out more information about the topic. The important word here is authority: Google are constantly on the lookout for what they consider to be the most authoritative websites on any given subject. They measure authority partly by the number on incoming links from related websites, but also increasingly by analysis of the text on the page itself.
* Make each page of your website unique, and targeted at a different keyword or phrase. Don't just rehash the content of your homepage from the rest of the pages of your website. Each page should have its own topic, as well as page-specific keywords. For example, if your article is about pets, you can have pages for dogs, cats, etc., each with keywords appropriate to these.
* Add content regularly. Not only will you be able to use more keywords to bring more traffic to your website, regularly adding content will also keep people interested in your website because they know that you have something new to offer them. Google's spiders will also come back more often the more new content you keep adding.
* Consider article length. Until recently it was said that an 'article' of 250 words was quite sufficient, but the recent changes that Google have made have changed that quite a lot. Now the minimum length of an article on a web page should be 4-500 words, and providing that quality and authority can be maintained, the longer the better.
* Don't abuse keyword optimization. When using keywords, do make sure that the keywords you use are actually relevant to your website otherwise you'll only annoy a lot of people when they realize that your website doesn't have any connection to what they're searching for.
There are no guarantees regarding search engine optimization or keyword optimization. Nobody can know for sure wha
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