Professional Social Promotion

This article is all about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, the art of getting your articles or sites to the top of the first page of a Google search, or any other search engine for that matter.

I cannot explain everything about SEO in this page, but I will give you the basic knowledge that I use everyday when I write articles.

URL and Title

The title is probably the most important thing in SEO, because Google looks for an exact match to a given search, or as close as possible, and the first place it looks is the title.

It is a good idea to do keyword research, if only just to Google your title before you start writing, to see what the competition is like.

You also have to be aware of the way people type in their searches. Your title must be something that lots of people would type into Google, in those exact words.

The URL also has a pretty big influence on the search results, and it is better if your main keywords are as close as possible to the start of the URL, that is why it is good to buy a relevant domain name, if you want to make a niche site about a particular topic.

Keyword Content

Most experts agree that the ideal amount of your main tagged keywords is somewhere around 3% of the text on the page.

That means 3% for each one, if possible. If you write a two hundred word article, that would mean you would mention the keywords six times each, although a little less would be alright too.

Complimentary keywords are almost as important. These are keywords that Google recognizes are relevant to the subject matter, like if it was an article about SEO, then keywords, title choice, back links and traffic are all complimentary keywords.

Back Links

I make back links to my posts and web pages from other relevant articles and sites, and from social bookmarking and social networking sites like Facebook, Google Plus, Digg, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Linked In, Delicious, etc.

My favorite tool for doing this is a free downloadable browser add-on called Add This. You can Google it. It just plugs into your Firefox browser, and has hundreds of buttons which lead to sites with good page ranks where you can make back links to your site.

Back links with do follow links give your site link weight, which are points that Google use to calculate your Google rating, among many other algorithms.

If you want to know which sites have do follow links, and which ones are no follow, I suggest getting another free Firefox plugin from SEO Book. Just google SEO Book toolbar, and you’ll find it, or there’s another one called SEO Quake that I like using.

Link weight is divided by the amount of links coming from a page, but you may not want to be too greedy with your links either.

Google have an algorithm for everything, and one of them is the hilltop algorithm which looks at the quality and authority of the other outbound links coming from a back link.

Traffic

Google likes to see a good amount of traffic on a site over time, but it doesn’t rate this algorithm too highly, or otherwise new sites would have a lot of trouble beating the competition in a Google search.

Google likes older over newer, except for the really new, and Google favors local content over foreign sites, and they actually have so many algorithms written into the search engine that even the top engineers at Google don’t really know how it works completely.

Basically, you just have to make quality, relevant content, make it seem popular, and important, and then you should get your articles to the first page of a Google search. That’s SEO for you.