If you were to make chocolate chip cookies, you would need to do a few things to ensure successful results. Namely, you must: gather your ingredients, measure accurately, and assemble all of the ingredients according to the recipe. If you neglect a step, your recipe may fail. The same is true of search engine optimization. To achieve successful results, (in this case, high search engine rankings), it's important to follow the recipe.

Step 1: Gather your ingredients. Words will be your main ingredients when it comes to search engine optimization. Keywords are especially important. If your text were chocolate chip cookies, keywords would be the chocolate chips.

Choose your keywords according to the audience you are targeting. Usually they will be derived from what your website is about. They should be words that your target audience would use as search terms. For example, if your business is selling organic health foods, you'd probably want to choose 'organic health foods' as your keywords.

Step 2: Measure accurately. Search engines rank a web page based largely upon the text that it contains. They prefer blocks of test, as opposed to individual sentences scattered here and there about the page. Too few words, and your page might get overlooked. Conversely, you don't need thousands of words to catch the attention of a search engine. Usually 500 words (give or take a couple hundred on either side) will suffice.

Your text body is like your cookie dough. Now, it's time to add your chocolate chips, or keywords. It's important that you 'measure' those too. Your keywords should number between 1.5% and 5% of your total number of words. Less than that, and your page may not get a high enough ranking to attract your target audience. More, and search engines may assume you're trying to trick them. They might not index your page at all.

Step 3: Assemble the ingredients and follow the recipe. Following the recipe is important. If you don't mix the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies in the correct order, you won't get very appetizing cookies. Similarly, you need to mix your keywords into your text in the right order.

Search engines assume that terms which appear in certain strategic locations within your text are more important that others. These locations include the title, the opening paragraph, and the closing paragraph.

It's okay to put some keywords in other parts of your text too. But it's critical to insert them in these strategic locations. If you concentrate all of them into the middle of your text, your page may not get indexed under your desired terms. Always include your keywords in these three locations for the best possible results.

The true test of your chocolate chip cookie recipe comes when you put your cookies into the oven. How they come out will depend upon how well you followed the recipe. The same is true of search engine optimization. When you post your text to your website and publish it on the Internet, follow your rankings in the major search engines.

Give them 2-3 weeks to find your page and scan it. If you rank high after this period of time, you probably found an effective recipe. If you aren't pleased with the ranking, or you can't find your ranking at all, you may need to tweak your recipe. Often, all it takes is a few minor adjustments and then to put it back 'in the oven.' Eventually you should hit on a combination of ingredients that will give you the successful results you desire.