To drive traffic to your website, you need to understand how search engine optimization, or SEO, works. To understand SEO, you need to understand how search engines work. To put it bluntly, search engines have workers and thinkers, spiders and indexers. The spiders collect as many documents as they can and bring them to the indexer. The indexers ‘read’ them and then apply an algorithm ONLY TO THE TEXT, very important to remember, and give it a score to present only the relevant search results. So the key to applying SEO effectively is to write content with this algorithm in mind.

An SEO professional could easily take days of your time to discuss the ins and outs of search engine optimization. And since search engine algorithms change from time to time, they may have reason to have a lot to say. In my opinion, SEO shouldn’t take too much of your time, it’s always better to write engaging content for people than for machines. If you remember the following 4 highlights, you should do well in the long run.

So, mental note to myself, remember the following 4 headlines:

o Keyword prominence

or proximity

or Density

or Frequency

Keyword prominence is exactly what it says; Make your keywords stand out. Put them at the top of every page, put them in title headers and in the first paragraph of your text. Apparently, it’s even important to put keywords at the beginning of an award. ‘SEO I must learn’, if you are a fan of Star Wars. If you think about it, it actually makes sense. If you have a page with ‘get traffic’ in the name, ‘get traffic’ in the title, and ‘get traffic’ mentioned multiple times in the first paragraph, I’m guessing the article is about getting traffic.

Keyword proximity refers to how close keywords are to each other. You must have heard of that old saying: “Keywords from a pen come together.” Actually, this should come quite naturally if you’re writing about a certain topic.

The keyword frequency tells the search engine that you are staying on topic and that the whole article is definitely about ‘getting traffic’. Again, this makes a lot of sense, if you have a lot of ‘get traffic’ at the beginning of your article and none at the end, you may have lost your way and the search engines may not like that. If you consistently reference the same words, that article is likely to be about that topic and then relevant to the search.

Keyword density is a holistic view of your entire article and is measured as a percentage. This article is about 700 words long and ‘getting traffic’ is mentioned about 10 times. That gives me a keyword density of 1.5% for the keyword phrase ‘get traffic’. Because spammers, and especially pornographers, have realized that these search engines are likely to flag sites that have ridiculous keyword densities. The recommended density for your keywords should be in the range of 3-7%. As a side note, words like ‘is’, ‘our’ and ‘the’ are not counted.

As you have probably noticed, these 4 SEO factors are quite related. And throughout this article we only use one key phrase, “get traffic”. Now imagine you have 10 keywords that you want to rank for. If I was too concerned about SEO, I would write something that would make little sense to a real person or just consider it spam. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: It’s much better for your readers and their sanity to produce good, accurate content. That’s what really gets your traffic.

So, in a nutshell, you need to remember:

o Search engines only read text, so include at least 100 words on each page of text

o Use keywords at the top of the page, paragraphs

o Place keywords close to each other

o Repeat keywords 3-7 times per 100 words

or get traffic