As I waded into the 'Make Money Online' waters on the Internet, I felt I needed to do some research on what keywords might help me generate traffic for my websites. I am very, very new to this whole Internet marketing arena but at the simplest level it seems that the keys to generating income are:

Blog >>> Choose Target Keywords >>> Write Articles Incorporating Keywords >>> Create New Pages For Articles >>> Link Article Pages To Blog >>> Link Article Pages To Each Other >>> Populate All Pages with PPC Links >>> Submit Articles To Outlets >>> Submit All Pages To Search Engines

Did I say it was simple? As I said, I am new to this area so there may be a step or two (or 5, or 10, etc...) I've missed. Your end goal is to get your links to appear on the first page of the major search engines when someone searches on your targeted keywords.

Smithutopia.com (http://www.smithutopia.com) was developed utilizing one of the leading blogging systems today, Google's Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com). A blog is a great place to cut your teeth writing articles. As you post your ideas, situations, actions and events you will notice that some of your items start to resemble articles. All it takes is a little polish at that point to have a finished product.

How does all of the above steps help you achieve the goals you have set forth? The magic word is 'backlinks'. Backlinks are the links that people have placed on their websites that lead to your website or any of the pages of your website. Several of the major search engines place a high value on the number of links that go to your website from out sites and thus place you in their search engine accordingly. Here is a simple example.

Site 'A' has 1000 sites that link back to it.

Site 'B' has 10 sites that link back to it.

Site 'A' should place higher in the search engines when someone searches for a targeted keyword/phrase that both sites covet.

At this point, some of the more 'seasoned' web gurus are crying foul at my above statement. Relax, I realize there is more to it but I'm just taking one step at a time.

Next time...Quality of backlinks, Placing targets on keywords

Donnie Smith is a technology specialist. You can read more about this subject and others at his online blog, Smithutopia (http://www.smithutopia.com).