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Do you know SEO? It doesn't matter whether you're a newbie in internet marketing or a seasoned one " SEO has a lot to do with your survival and success online. In fact, ask anyone who knows the ropes and they'll tell you that a large part of their efforts are focused on ensuring that they use SEO principles to attract traffic, bring in more customers and eventually sell more. Learn what SEO entails and how you can integrate it into your internet marketing business:

The art and science of SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization, the process used by internet marketers, website owners, online businesses and bloggers in order to produce content that will be relevant to search queries performed by their target market. The more a website and its content are optimized for search engines, the more likely they will appear high on search engine results.

An optimized site selling handmade herbal soaps, for example, will appear in the results listing for queries involving keywords like 'herbal soaps' and 'handmade soaps'. If the optimization efforts are excellent, it can even appear with generalized searches involving the key phrase 'herbal products'. It all depends on the type of SEO effort the site owner or Web master used to make sure that the site appears high in the listing.

What's with the results page?

The results page is the web page that appears before you each time you make a search through a search engine such as Google, AskJeeves, AOL, MSN, Yahoo! or some other similar site offering the same service. That page will list the links to sites or documents that are relevant to your search.

If you look closely, you'll find that a search for 'acne treatment', for example, will come up with millions of hits. In theory, you can go through all these links to find what you're looking for. However, with the limited time and patience you have, you'll probably check out the links on the first page of the results listing, starting from the top. Once you find what you're looking for, would you still bother with the second or third pages? Definitely not. That is why any experienced internet marketer will tell you that the priceless real property is found on the first page of results pages. That is where you want the link to your site to appear.

So what made the links on the first results page appear there? It's SEO. These links are listed according to their relevance " the more relevant and reliable the link is, the more likely it will appear high on the page. That is what good SEO does " it has the power to grab your intended audience's attention while providing them with quality content at the same time.

Good SEO and Bad SEO

Many newbies in internet marketing think search engines can be tricked into giving them the first few slots on the results page. What they do is bombard their content with keywords, hoping that would do the trick.

Unfortunately for them and fortunately for surfers, there is such thing as excess being harmful to health. The same holds true for SEO efforts. In the past, misguided site owners and copywriters tried to abuse the system by inserting key words and key phrases repeatedly throughout the content and key areas on their website. This is called keyword stuffing, something that most readers find have little use to their search purposes and offering little to zero value. Writing content for a 500-word article, for example, then assailing your reader's senses by making sure the keyword appears in over 40% of the write-up makes the write-up extremely ridiculous and desperate.

Implementing SEO in internet marketing

SEO is actually based on a simple concept " using related keywords and key phrases in a way that makes the relevance of the content noticeable to search engines. However, it does demand so much more than just cleverly placed words within a group of paragraphs. Search engines are wired in such a way that they don't only look for the relevance in your website " they also spot the value of a well-written article and the quality of the internal and external links built into it. It's really about being relevant and popular at the same time.

So how can a newbie implement SEO in internet marketing? Research. It's important to understand which search queries your website will respond to and which keywords and key phrases to use that will ultimately result to a click on your site or a conversion. Look for keywords to use with your website's content " from the title to the content to the links " that will help you hone in on your target market. And yes, do offer real, honest-to-goodness quality content. Spend time and effort producing write-ups that your visitors can actually use and build links to sites that give your reputation a boost.

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