However, SEO is not just about use of keywords. It is more accurate to say that SEO is about the relevant, appropriate and substantial use of keywords within good content. It is true that Google sets rankings based on keyword density, but the search engines don

This is where you have to decide how you are going to maintain that balance. It is certainly not impossible to write well and be SEO compliant, you just need to find where you will place the keywords and make sure that the text around them is appropriately well-written. If you have a target of 500 words and want a keyword density of about 20-25

To add pages to search engine results, engines send out what is known as a ‘bot’ or a ’spider’. This non-human bot will search the internet for pages, and whatever it finds will eventually be indexed (that is, included in a search engine results page). Yet there are literally millions of websites on the internet, and sometimes waiting for a search engine bot to crawl your page and index it – well, it can literally take weeks.

This is where the sitemap comes in. The sitemap is a “heads up”, basically calling the search engine’s attention to your website.

When your website is complete, you will need to build your sitemap (or ideally, build it as you go along). This can be done using a simple Notepad .txt file, with a list of URLs of each page of your site, written on a separate line and then uploaded to your server. Alternatively, if you are using Wordpress self-hosted, you can install a plugin called “XML Google Sitemaps” – which automatically generates and updates your sitemap as you go along.

The plugin will generate a URL (usually www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml), or alternatively with the .txt file, upload it and obtain the URL yourself. You should then take the URL of your sitemap, and submit it to all of the major search engines, using a tool such as Google Webmaster Tools. When submitted, the engine will know to send a bot to crawl the pages you’ve submitted – and will usually do so in a matter of days. Sitemaps really can make indexing that easy, and are therefore an absolute must.

Yet what is duplicate content? It very much depends on your definition. For some, perhaps less experienced or professional, internet marketers, unique content is simply a catch-all term that means any content that won’t receive a flag in a program such as CopyScape. That can mean that the content of the article (such as “how to build a doll house”) is exactly the same, only the words of the article are rearranged to appear in a different order, and thus pass CopyScape

Is that really unique content though? Probably not. Unique content, in the truest meaning of the word, is something that is truly unique. Something that has been written from scratch, by a human being, which imparts a previously undiscovered knowledge or opinion. That is the true meaning of unique content, and it’s websites that feature this kind of information that rank well in search engines.

Of course, if you’re working within a much written about niche, it’s hard to keep finding groundbreaking information to refer to continually. So perhaps the truth of unique content is somewhere in between the two extremes; content that is freshly written for the specific website by a human being, that may cover old ground, but at least does it in a useful and well written way.

Quality content is determined as something that provides something to the reader. That might be news, it might be information, it might be help guides; basically, anything that leaves the reader more informed than they were prior to reading the content. And quality content, as the saying goes, is King.

The reason is simple. In the job description internet marketer, the key word is “marketer” – and it’s a darn sight easier to market a website that provides useful, quality information. With quality content, you can hope that other people will enjoy the content, and thus take some of the marketing out of your hands. Visitors may find the text of your site informative, and will link to the article on a forum you’ve never heard of. Suddenly, there’s a back link you would never normally have had, and all without you lifting a finger.

It may seem like keywords are all that matter if you want to be a successful internet marketer, but they’re not. Like most things, IM success is a balancing act. Yes, you need keywords, but those keywords need to be inserted in to high quality content for your IM career to really take off.

People who are new to SEO may quickly consider themselves an expert. You can search Twitter, and will find a thousand profiles cheerfully insisting that the person running the account is an SEO expert. SEO Expert is not (like doctor, or dietitian) a legally protected term, so anyone can claim to be so. And many users may genuinely feel they are an expert, and that they have nothing to benefit from an SEO company. That’s the problem with new technologies.

If you are looking to launch a website to sell a product or service, you’re probably looking around the internet to see what you need to know. Eventually, the term SEO – and it’s importance – will crop up, along with the help guides telling you how to do it yourself. Doing it yourself is a lot cheaper than outsourcing to a company, so why should you both?

Put simply, no one can be an expert in a short period of time. The people who run SEO service companies really are experts, who have studied the art of SEO for long periods of time. You will always, unless you can spare several months to learn it all yourself, get better results with them.