I have only been writing online for 4 full months now, but I have done a lot of reading and want to share what I have learned about search engine optimization.  I am sure that I have a lot more learning to do and will keep learning along the way, refining my techniques and improving not only my results but my online revenues as well.

It is imperative that you learn how to use this tool most effectively.  This tool will let you enter a keyword or keyword phrase and determine the number of monthly searches that are conducted on the internet for that keyword or phrase.  It will also tell you how much advertisers are willing to pay for each click on their ads which will directly affect the amount of revenue you can ultimately make from your online content.  I am not sure how often the keyword tool is updated, however.  Interestingly, I have a list of keywords that I am tracking and have found that the data in October 2009 is the same as in July 2009.  But, I think in general the data is relevant.

What are long tail keywords?  Well, if you take the term “gardening”, that is a very broad keyword that yields over 49 million web pages in the Google search results.  It would be very difficult for someone brand new to the internet marketing world to rank high in that term.  But, if I look for “rose gardening in Florida” with quotations, I find there are only 5 sites.  It would be easy to rank on the first page of Google with that long tail keyword phrase.  Granted with only 5 sites, the ad revenue would be non-existent, but I am illustrating my point.

You want to target these long tail keyword phrases where there is just enough competition to provide the opportunity for healthy ad revenues but also give you the opportunity to rank well.  You would prefer to compete against 100,000 or fewer websites while having a CPC of $2 or better and about 3000 monthly searches.  Once you find one of these keyword phrases be sure to write it down and keep looking for more.  You will want to identify several of these phrases so that you can work on writing for these different niches taking a shotgun approach.

This is another full article by itself but suffice it to say that you want to have your keyword in the URL for your article.  The way that HubPages is constructed, you can use various keywords in the URL when you begin constructing your Hub.  Be sure that the main keyword you wish to target is in that URL.  Also, use the keyword in your title and in subheadings.  You can also use related keywords in the subheadings as well.

Next, it is important to get backlinks to your article.  Backlinks are link which point back to your main article.  This can be done by writing articles for other content sites or related blogs that you have.  You can leave comments with links to your article on “gardening” and “rose gardening” blogs and forums.  I ran across an interesting concept in my reading this weekend called a “link wheel”.  That is another article by itself, but you should look it up.

Once you have begun to rank for “rose gardening in Florida”, you can start working your way up the competition ladder by writing articles on “rose gardening” in general.  Then you can link these articles to your “rose gardening in Florida” article which will give them more credibility.  There are 125,000 webpages with the phrase “rose gardening”.  In this way you can have a better chance at ranking for more competitive keywords and bring search engine authority to your articles, blog, or website.

These are just a few of the things that I have been learning about through my online reading about search engine optimization.  It will take some time and effort to find those phrases and begin working on them, writing articles and building links.  But once that is done, and you are ranking high in Google, it will be well worth it.  I have found some articles and blogs that rank high but have not even been updated for several years.  Knock those sites out of the top spots, and you can begin to get lots of search engine traffic.