As a content writer, you must know how to generate maximum visibility for the content you publish. For this, even as a novice, you need to learn the basic techniques of search engine optimization. Without optimizing your content for improved search engine rankings, your content will not get sufficient readers, irrespective of how engaging your writing is. Here are a few essential SEO concepts you need to understand:

• Keywords: Every article you write about has one central or key theme that it talks about. It can be a relevant word or even a phrase on which the article is based. This is what people will search for using search engines like Google to get to your content. Whenever you write an article, spend some time to identify the right keyword that will lead visitors to your content. An easy way of do it is to find the question that your content can provide answers to.

• Long tail keywords and single word keywords: The latter, as the name suggests, is a keyword that is just one word. On the other hand, a long tail keyword consists of two or more words, in the form of a phrase. Ideally, your content should feature long tail keywords that allow your content to show up in more targeted and specific search results, thereby increasing the relevance of your content.

• Keyword density: SEO doesn't just end at identifying the right keyword of your content, but making sure that this keyword appears prominently and is distributed across your content. Keyword density is just that - the number of times your keyword appears within your content. A rule of thumb is to have a keyword density of around 2%, i.e. having your keyword appear twice for every 100 words.

• Keyword research: If you are completely clueless about how keywords help improve the chances of your content being noticed online, there are a number of tools like Google's keyword tool that you can use to analyze the effectiveness of different keywords, and select the one that is most popularly searched for and is the most profitable, and hence maximize the visibility of your content.

Now that you have grasped the basic concepts of SEO, here are some useful tips and techniques to put your knowledge into practice when writing content:

• Feature your keyword in the title of your article - if it's the first word within the title, it becomes most effective. If not, you can settle for featuring it within the title.

• Ideally, it would be great if the introduction of your article begins with the keyword; if that's not possible, ensure that the very first sentence mentions your keyword. The same is valid for the concluding line of your article.

• Try to use your keyword, or variations of your keyword (secondary keyword) at least 2-3 times within a 500 word article.

These steps just make your content appear more relevant and likely to be thrown up as a result when users look for information through search engines.