Let’s face it – the internet is more competitive these days than it has been since its inception some short time ago. With the popularity of search engines such as Google at an all time high, it is becoming more and more clear that your website will surely sink if it does not show up on the first page of a search engine. Many people that have a beginner’s knowledge of websites and the internet are clueless as to how to get their site to show up at the top of a Google search, but the reality of the situation is that it is much less complicated than you might think.

First, a brief explanation as to how a search on websites such as Google actually works. When someone searches for a word, say “ocean”, the search engine goes through a list of millions of websites that have the word “ocean” as what is called a meta tag in the source code of their website. This is called spidering. The more that the search engine feels that the website closely matches the term searched for, the higher up on the list it will end up. This is the basic tenant of search engine optimization, or SEO.

SEO serves the primary function of helping to get a website the highest rank possible in a search engine. Webmasters will often hone in on a specific range of keywords that they feel are most frequently searched on a site like Google. For example, if a website is devoted to sea kayaking, they might try to load the site up with reference words like sea, ocean, kayak, kayaking etc. The closer the match to the search, the better the chance that their website will pop up at the top of the search page.

Often times, someone who runs a website will ask people to write and submit articles that they will post on a blog section on their site. They will often give guidelines for the type of article, which usually will be related to the main function of the website, as well as various keywords they would like used in the article, and the amount of times that they may be repeated. The main function of these articles is to help optimize the site’s ability to be found within a search engine, as once the article is posted to the site, the keywords become meta tags that will be picked up by the search engine. This explains why there are often strict guidelines as to how many times a keyword can be repeated, as this changes the impact on the SEO of the site.

Many times, webmasters will ask for many different articles to be written, usually all along the same lines but with different keywords and perhaps different subjects. These articles will all get posted to an extremely large block of text on a blog or a similar type of web page. In the end, and perhaps to the dismay of the author, these articles are not as much meant to be read by onlookers as they are to serve as SEO aids. Think of a blog as an army, with each post being a soldier trying to fight his way to the front of the search engine list. If enough posts are compiled, the goal will often times be achieved.

No matter which side you are on, the fact remains that articles can be an important tool to aid in a website’s ability to be found by search engines, and there is no better time than now to get on board!