Whether you’re an experienced blogger, or you’re just getting into the business of making money online, you’ve probably heard the term SEO tossed around a lot. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the concept of increasing your ranking on search engine pages in order to increase traffic to your website.

Good content may be the most important part of SEO and marketing. Gone are the days where you could simply garner large amounts of traffic by putting an obnoxious list of keywords at the end of your page. Potential customers, as well as search engine robots, have become wise to such tactics, and doing this will usually cause you to be removed from the listings entirely. Now in order to garner favor with search engine gods you must create content on your pages that people actually want to use. You must insert you keywords into text that can engage and inform your audience. This has the double blessing of making your site better for customers, and garnering favor with the major search engines.

When optimizing content, make sure that your headings and first paragraph are where you focus your attention. You will need to ensure that your main keyword is in here somewhere, and it is best to make sure you include any other similar keywords you want to cover within these sections. This will key the robots into what your main topic is going to be, and can help draw readers attention to your topic also. Do not use misleading titles or headings on your page to try and gain traffic from other sources. Readers will quickly leave your site, and search engines will notice that your keywords are off.

While back-linking is important, you need to make sure your site is optimized first. You can spend as much time as you want posting on social media and blogs about your site, but if that site is worthless search engines still won’t rank you. Avoid paying for listings in link farms at all costs. Google and other sites recognize them as what they are and do not use their links to rank content. If you need a way to create links to your site, you may wish to create several sites on your topic and use them to link to each other. Just don’t abuse this or you may get marked as a content farm and lose your ranking.

Don’t go overboard with your keywords. If you go over seven percent saturation with a given keyword the robots may see your content as thin. You do want to get at least three percent saturation, however, to make sure your topic is clear. If you are looking for good keywords to feature you can use Google Trends to see which terms are searched for most often.

Most importantly, be patient. Learning SEO takes time, and you would be surprised what is and isn’t effective. Make changes carefully and track your results to see what happens. This is a constantly changing field, so what works today may not continue to work so well tomorrow. Keep at it and eventually you will succeed.