SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is quite important in getting your articles on the first page of a Google search. The first thing you need to focus on is picking the right title.

Title Choice

Title choice is extremely important, because it is the first algorithm that Google looks for when doing a search. You will want to pick a title that people are searching for a lot, but that does not have a huge amount of competition, especially from big websites with lots of money.

Keywords

Once you have your title, you will want to pick a list of keywords, keyword phrases, and complimentary keywords for your article to be based around. The optimum amount of keywords is not known by anyone except Google, but if you have about five main keywords, you should include them as 2-5% of the text of the article.

Finishing the On-Page Optimization

The next step is making a few bold subheadings, photos, videos, etc, then you make some relevant outgoing links, and then it is time to publish. Once you have published, you want to gradually increase the number of back links from relevant sites, or sites with good page ranks.

The Importance of Back Links

You want to have lots of different relevant link text leading back to your article. It is good to write on as many different sites as possible, so long as you are allowed to make do follow links from the text of the articles on that site, and so long as it has a good page rank.

SEO is about giving Google, and the other search engines what they are looking for in their search algorithms. Some of the other algorithms are traffic, regularly updated content, the age of a site, and also the location it was submitted from.

You can download a free browser add-on called Add This to make it easier to make back links from sites such as Digg, Delicious, Linked in, etc, and you can also write articles on different article writing sites, with links leading back to your original article from relevant link text.

Generally, you need to make good quality, relevant articles, perhaps all about a similar topic, and use good SEO methods which include writing regularly.