Optimize Your Search Engine Rankings for Articles

As you might know, using appropriate keywords in articles is important to have your page or article properly indexed and searchable on the major search engines for those keywords. If you are one of the few who don't know about keyword optimization, please feel free to read this Associated Content article: How to Utilize Keywords - to help get you started and then you can come back and learn some of these more advanced strategies.

'On page' optimization is a term that refers to your actual webpage where the content you have written appears. If you are the one hosting or developing the webpage, there are many things you can do to increase the on page optimization such as: use the keywords in the meta tags, alt tag the images with the keywords, use the keywords in the page title (in the html code) and use the keywords in the page's URL.

If you are not in control of the website where your writing or content will be published or posted, then you can't do all of these things, but there are some simple on page optimization tricks you can use.

For example, you should try to use your keywords or keyword phrases as close to the beginning of the article as possible and as close to the end of the article as possible, with a few placements in the middle. Remember, oftentimes content articles are spread out onto several pages, and if you don't have your keywords placed well, evenly distributed throughout the article, this can lower your placement when indexed.

Secondly, while the internet is moving away from this, some search engines do still look for bolded or italicized keywords. The best way to achieve this is to use paragraph headers in a few locations that you bold or italicize. This isn't all that important, but every little bit can help increase your page views. You should also be sure to use your keywords in your title and/or subtitle.

However, everyone else using those same keywords or writing about the same type of content you have written about will also be doing the same things. On the internet, where content is king, you are competing with every other website that has ever used those keywords you have used in your article or content.

So you need to learn to take your optimization off page for the best results and highest placement in the major search engines.

On page pertains to what you see when you actually click on the URL link to take you to your page or article. Off page pertains to things that are not on the actual page or article itself.

Off page optimization is a term that refers to the process of increasing your search engine rankings and placement by the things you do outside of the actual page. Let's take a look at some tips to help you optimize your content or articles off page.

First, the more places you can place a link back to your content, the higher it will place in search engine rankings. The higher the ranking, the higher the placement in search results for those keywords or keyword phrases.

You don't want to go around the internet begging people to place a link to your content on their websites, but it doesn't hurt to have your own website that has links back to your content on other people's sites. It also won't hurt to place links to your content in personal or business blogs, and you can also place links to content on other sites on any social networking or promotional site of which you may be a member.

When you place the links to your content on off site websites, you want to use anchor text instead of using the actual URL. This means that when they see the link, it doesn't start with http:// and then the link itself.

For example, if your keywords for your article are 'happy dogs', then you want to type the words HAPPY DOGS, then use the editor or html href code to make those words clickable and when clicked, the reader will be taken to the article. When you use the keywords in your anchor text on off site locations, you will increase your off page optimization.

When search engines and search directories choose your placement for your content or page in the search results returned for your keywords, they will look at several factors:

• What are the keywords
• What are the percentages of keywords to the total number of indexable words in the content (keyword density)
• How many other sites link to this particular URL where the content is located
• Are those other sites related content (for example, and link to an article about keyword optimization appearing on a site about internet content or keywords would be given a higher ranking than the same keyword optimization article appearing on a site about wedding dresses)
• How much traffic comes to your page through the use of your keywords in the search engine (pages and sites are indexed regularly, and if your content or page is listed at #3 for the keywords used but receives more hits/clicks than the one listed in #1, the next time you are indexed, you might bump up to #1)
• Keywords in the anchor text for the links to off site URLs
  

As you can see, getting good search engine placement for your content takes a bit more than just using good keywords on page. You will need to promote your content or articles off page too, and use the properly optimization techniques for doing so.

While the results for off page optimization do not occur as quickly as the results for on page optimization, if you track your search engine placement prior to off page optimization and compare it to the placement after about two weeks to a month of off page optimization, you will likely find that you can drastically improve your search engine rankings and placement.

One last thing...

When you write content or articles, be sure to consider adding anchored links on those new content or articles to some of your older content or articles that are about similar subjects. Not only will this increase your off page optimization for the new and the old articles, but it cross references your work to your own work, instead of to someone else.

When you cross link your work, pages, articles and content in such a way, a reader could stumble upon one of your pages or articles by accident or design, but you have the ability to lead them to other content they might not have discovered otherwise.