Basic Seo Tips for Online Success

I was browsing around in the Hubpages forum and noticed that someone who is new to the site was asking how people will find our Hubs. The answer is the same as it is for all internet writing. People will find your website, articles, Hubpages hubs, Squidoo lenses, etc primarily through search engine optimization.

When I first started writing online, I did so without even knowing about SEO. In other words, I wrote without worrying about if people saw my site or not. My traffic levels were pretty low on my first online efforts and I wasted a lot of time.

If only I knew what I was doing back then...

So that's the purpose of this hub - to teach you some SEO basics. I personally only ever use the basics and I've had good results. Yes, you can spend more time on it and make things a little more complicated, but for me, the return on investment doesn't add up.

Every time I write an article, blog post, or work on creating Hubs or lenses on Squidoo I go through these steps.

1. What do I want to write?

First, I think about the topic that I want to write about. For example, for this Hub I new I wanted to write about SEO from a beginner's standpoint.

2. Research the Keywords

Once I know the topic I want to write about, the next step is to find the keywords. I use Google's keyword tool now. For this article, I typed in "SEO" in the box. I finally settled on the keyword "basic seo tips".

3. Put the Keyword in the URL

On hubpages, this is accomplished by putting the keyword in the title - it automatically becomes part of the URL. This is the same for other sites, even on your wordpress blogs if you have the permalinks set to your postname. If it isn't automatic, figure out how to get the keyword in the URL.

4. Keyword in Intro

Then, I make sure to put the keyword once in the introduction paragraph. It doesn't need to be in the first sentence. I find that the SEO is just as effective if the keyword is in the intro.

5. One More Time in Article

The last place where I put the keyword is somewhere in the article - just once. Back when I first started writing internet content for my clients (seems like ages ago!) the established SEO technique was to stuff the keywords in. Think of this era as the polar opposite of that. Less is more!

6. Write Naturally

Sure, you can research secondary keywords but I find that just by writing naturally, the article flows better and we write keywords into our copy anyhow. If readers detect keywords in the text (and once you do this for a while you'll start to be able to) it becomes clear that they are highly distracting and break the flow of what you're trying to write.

This is another piece of the search engine optimization puzzle. The more backlinks (quality ones) that the site has, the better it will do in the search engines. You can create your own quality backlinks through article marketing.

Submit the articles to sites like Squidoo, Ezinearticles, adn Goarticles.

For example, if you want your hubs to be more successful, you should work on creating backlinks coming in to your different sites.

Don't worry too much about this. Once you have great content on your site, people will start sharing it with others and you'll get backlinks naturally if the content is good.