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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be a very complicated subject with varying correct answers. They are several key areas to help you with your SEO and get more people to read your articles, blogs and web pages. These free web sites can get you started with SEO areas like keywords, proper keyword density, content and links.

Keywords and Keyword Density

Keyword density is the percentage your relevant keywords show up in an article, and is important to your SEO and page ranking in the search engines. If you have a 1,000 word article and your keyword appears 10 times in the article, that is 1%. There is some disagreement as to what is the best keyword density percentage. Some say between 4% and 7%. Different search engines also have their own percentages they look for. If you have your keywords show up too many times in an article, that is known as "keyword stuffing" and search engines might not rank you at all, or disqualify your blog or article for this reason. Too low a keyword percentage and you might not rank very high in the search engines. According to Donald Pennington’s SEO article, you should never exceed 5%. I think that is a good rule of thumb to follow.

When you write an article it is best to keep SEO in the back of your mind and try to include your keywords so they fit nicely in the article without ruining your article. When you are done with the article you can then use a text analyzer to check your keywords density percentage and if needed tailor the article slightly to get a higher keyword percentage for better SEO if needed.

Free Web Sites to Check Your Keyword Density

There are several web sites where you can copy and paste your article and look at different keywords and their percentages.

· Textalyser.net lets you paste your article and check it before you submit it.

· Keyword Analyzer also lets you paste your article to check for keywords before submitting it.

· Live Keyword Analysis also lets you paste in your article and you enter in your keywords, it returns the percentages.

Article Readability

It is important that your articles are readable. Textalyser.net gives a readability score. If you use Microsoft Word, you can also get a readability score. There is a metric known as the Flesch-Kincaid readability score and a corresponding US grade level score. An optimal Flesch-Kincaid score is 60-70. If you get a grade level score of 7.5, this indicates a person halfway through the 7th grade could read and understand the article. No, this doesn’t mean it will look like a 7th grader wrote it. It shows the general ease of readability of your article.

To use the Microsoft Word readability tool, click on Tools, Options, Spelling & Grammar, and then select the Show Readability Statistics box. Do a spell check of your article and when that is finished a box will show up with the readability score.

Links, Backlinks and Interlinking

Backlinks, also known as inbound links are important for SEO. Search engines will look at the number of quality inbound links to your web page or articles. Quality can mean the ranking of the web site that has a link to your articles and the relevance. If you have an inbound link to your gardening article from a car repair web site, that might not count for much, but if you have the inbound link from a major garden web site or garden company, that is quality and relevance.

Anchor links are helpful for SEO. This basically means to include your keyword in the link. Instead of using “click here”, make the link part of the sentence with your keyword or put the title of the article with the keyword in it, use something like “see this article about SEO” as the phrase you use in the link if one of your keywords is SEO. This is known as anchor text. Steve Feller has an example of this in his SEO article.

There is disagreement as to whether interlinking is helpful, some articles say yes and others say no. Linking one article on Factoidz.com to another article on Factoidz is interlinking and can be viewed favorably by search engines. Plus it gets exposure for your other articles in a related area. I believe it is helpful for your SEO.

SEO Pro will show the list of web sites with links and also show if the web site has the NO FOLLOW tag. If it does, that doesn’t help your SEO with links but could still get you more traffic.

· SEO Pro is a great backlink checker

· WebMasters Backlink Checker is another great backlink checker.

· Webconfs backlink builder is a tool where you enter in one of your keywords or themes to your blogs and articles and the tool returns a list of related web sites for your theme that you can put links on.

· Iwebtools is a toolbox of SEO tools.

I used to think that the social bookmark sites like Digg, Mixx, Delicious and Facebook added backlinks, but I didn’t see any of those in the backlink list of my articles. I did see backlinks from Reddit.com, Simpy.com and Diigo.com.

Adding Your Blog to the Search Engines

It is helpful for your SEO if you can add your blogs to search engines and blog listing sites.

· Google search engine submission.

· Yahoo search engine submission

· Bing search engine submission is very easy.

· The Open Directory is a great place to submit your blogs and web sites but it takes more work. You have to pick the right category and write to them about your site.

· Technorati is another site to submit your blogs.

I found two different ways to submit your blogs on Google and Yahoo. One way was just enter in your blog's URL, another more complicated way is to authenticate your blog by adding HTML code into your blog. You might need to find someone to help you with that. I can help with inserting this code into a Google blogspot blog. This should get you started with your SEO.

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