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Used under Creative Commons Attribution licence, from RankedHard SEO

Hehehehe, found this online and loved it.  How true!

(If you’re looking for an easily understandable SEO book, check out IttyBiz SEO School (opens in new window) – fantastic ebook.  Leads you step by step through how to set up SEO on your site and why it all works, written in plain english for the non-techie.  Note: the price isn’t on the page but it’s $39.00 and worth every cent!)

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There’s been a lot of talk on the net lately about how Google is moving away from actual keywords and is ranking sites based on content.  Which means all the writers who write ‘articles’ (I’m using the term loosely there) stuffed to the gills with keywords will be out of business.  They’re going to have to start writing proper articles, filled with useful content, and only a few keywords used in an appropriate context within the article.

Here’s the disclaimer:  I’m no SEO expert.  I only recently realised that I had to enter details in to my SEO WordPress plugin.  I’m also no expert, if there is such a thing, on how Google ranks sites, or even how search engines find and display information.  I’ve done some research on it, done a lot of reading, and I have quite a few friends who are professional writers as well.

I have been told that having keywords in your title, in <h1> tags, helps because it tells the search engines give those words priority.  I’ve also been told that having the words ‘Sex’ and ‘Home Business’ also tend to rank well (this article has both sex and home business in the title deliberately)  and they attract a lot of traffic to your site.

However, if someone is coming to my site because they searched on the word ‘sex’ then they’re unlikely to be interested in the business information available here.  Finding the site through ‘home business’ would help them certainly.  I’m not too sure that I’m the right person to help them if they searched on ‘sex home business’ though!  I’ve also had a lot of searches for “make money online quickly” which pulls up this previous post, however I’m pretty sure those people are disappointed as well. 

For those of us who aren’t experts in SEO and are uncertain of how Google works (does anyone really know?) the best way to optimise your site with keywords and for SEO is simply to write quality content.  People will find you, other sites will link to you, your site url will be passed around as a go-to quality site that is worth the time to read.

Search engines are machines and websites aren’t read by machines – they’re read by people.   You need to write for people and not for search engines.  Good quality content, with enough keywords that fit organically within the context of the article will ultimately do more for your SEO and rankings than stuffing an article so full of keywords that it’s unreadable nonsense.  And in the process you’ll attract the customers that you want to bring, who will in turn bring others.

If you want to read about SEO from a person who knows a lot more about it than me, my good friend Marc Pieniazek is currently writing a series of posts on SEO.  I’ll be reading his posts avidly to learn more about SEO, and I highly recommend you sign up for his RSS feed so you don’t miss any as well.

For now, I’m going to be watching my stats with interest to see how well the keyword stuffing in the title draws traffic and from where.  Popcorn anyone?