Article jointly written by Mary Kearl, Community Editor, AOL Health and That's Fit.com; Robin Aguilar, Principal SEO Analyst, AOL Marketplace; and Kristi Anderson, Managing Editor, AOL Living.



Writing and publishing your article is only the first step to reaching a large audience. In order to turn that potential audience into an actual audience, there's one extra step you need to take, and that's to employ a bit of SEO copywriting.

Have we lost you already? No worries. Let's quickly review what SEO is.

Defining SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it's basically a way of formatting your article or website to ensure that it gets a higher ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. The goal is to have your page appear as the result directly below the query box at the top of any search engine.

We're sure you know from personal experience that you rarely scroll past the first page (or maybe the second page if you're persistent) of search engine results. So, no matter how great an article is, if it isn't formatted to a search engine's liking, it may never see the traffic of a lower-quality post (from an editorial standpoint) that is loaded up with special tricks to attract search engine attention.