The most important skill for web-writing may surprise you. If you want to be successful with online writing, then you absolutely have to know this skill. It is the the single most important thing you need to know for effective online writing. It’s called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
Writing for print publication and writing for online publication are entirely different forms of writing. Just as you learned the various writing styles for print writing, you need to learn SEO to not just compete but to succeed in the online marketplace. Good SEO is the difference between $5 an article gigs and $50 an article gigs.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is actually very simple to master and once you do you will find that markets open up to quickly. If you are wondering why, it’s because many companies take the sample you submit and run it through an SEO optimizer to see where your article stands. A writer with great SEO skills is in high demand.
SEO was initially developed as a way for search engines to see and index content so when someone searched for a particular keyword it could return appropriate pages. This is why when you type ‘Michael Jackson” into a search engine you don’t get pages devoted to Prince!
This changed a couple of years ago because for years people have filled up their writings with useless words and phrases to get a top search engine ranking. You have most likely seen pages that were filled with nothing but nonsense text. You landed there because you were searching for something and that site came up near the top of the search engine results. Have you noticed that this doesn’t happen much anymore? That’s because the top search engines began to punish those who did this. If these sites are indexed at all they are several pages down on the list.
Creating Great SEO
The key to great SEO is to have the right words located in the right places in the text. It has to flow naturally and make a good and interesting article as well. You need the appropriate keywords spaced throughout the text as well as in the title and any tags. Generally, you will not be responsible for writing the tags but if you are remember that they must be mentioned at least once in the article body itself.
As an example, let’s use one of my 500 word articles I wrote for an entertainment site.
‘Leverage’ Season 5, Episode 9 Recap: ‘The Rundown Job’
The keyword there is ‘Leverage’ and it needs to be mentioned again in the first paragraph of the article. Then it needs to be mentioned once more; I usually do this at the end.
Generally, but not always, the ratio is twice per 500 words. The keyword doesn’t have to be mentioned more than that because when the search engines view the page it will hit the title and tags then look for the appropriate text within the body of the article itself. It looks for both over and under use of the keyword and tags. Twice and even up to Four times is ok. Any more than that and your article runs the risk of being dubbed as questionable by the system and then virtually ignored in the rankings. For tags it is looking for a single use of each tag.
For this article, one of the tags was ‘the rundown job’ as that was the name of the episode. The phrase was used once. I also used the names of the characters of the show as tags. This way anyone who might be looking for information about that particular character would be able to access the page. As long as the word or phrase from the tag appears in the article at least once, you’re in great shape.
Choosing Great Keywords
Keyword selection is extremely important. The keyword must be used in the title but it can’t be a word that you are going to need to repeatedly use throughout the article itself. The keyword use of ‘Leverage’ for example means that I often have to refer to ‘the show’ or ‘the episode’ as opposed to using the name of the program itself. However not using ‘Leverage’ as the keyword would be counterproductive as that is the primary purpose of the article.
The keyword itself is the word or phrase that people are most likely to input into the search engine when searching for the topic. If someone is searching for “What happened last night on Leverage” the search engine is going to see ‘Leverage’ and ignore the rest of the words. The most recent articles indexed by the search engine for that keyword are going to appear first on the results page. My article ranked #1 on the list.
Don’t Manipulate the System
Once you understand how the indexing works it’s easy to manipulate the search engines. You can do this and may be successful for a short period of time. It’s better to play fair for one very important reason: your name.
Not only do the search engines examine the page to make sure it’s good content, they are also looking for names. They are designed to look for the author of the page as well as the site that it is located on and use that information to blacklist sites and writers of what it considers spam content.
For sites like WordPress, they look for the specific URL and log it. Repeated violations can get the page ignored for future searches but WordPress as a whole isn’t bothered. Content mills and those who write for them have seen this in action several times in recent months as Google has blacklisted not only the companies but specific writers as well. You do not want your name on that list. It can take months of good articles that follow the rules to get off the list. In the meantime you lose money.
This isn’t as bad as it sounds. None of the search engines expect perfection and they score the sites. As per our example, if I had used ‘Leverage’ instead of “the show” or “this episode” and ended up using the keyword 8 times, it wouldn’t have been a serious problem. I might have been ranked a bit lower in the ratings but there were enough other words to make it known that I was just overusing the word instead of attempting to spam or thwart the search engines.
Testing Your SEO Skills
If you are new to all of this there is a really simple (and FREE!) way to test your articles for their SEO qualities. Get a free blog on WordPress and install the SEO widget. Then you can just put your article there, click the SEO button and it will tell you how it does and what needs to be fixed. It doesn’t take many articles to get the hang of great SEO. There are also several free sites that will rate your SEO for free but I have found the WordPress widget to be the most accurate.
Once you master great SEO your articles will rank higher on search engines and be seen by more people. This will make you worth more money to those who want you to write for them, which is the final piece of the puzzle; writing for other people.
Show Me the Money
Most people who will hire you know little to nothing about SEO beyond those three letters and that it’s important. They may have hired other writers in the past that did nothing to improve their traffic. They may even have several other writers that they have hired along with you. Using great SEO will mean that the articles you write get more attention than those written by others. Let’s face it that is what writing online is all about.
It doesn’t matter how good or bad your article is if no one sees it. When you have been hired to write articles for a website or a blog, those articles need to be seen. You can be certain that your employer will know the count view and when your articles have 10 times the traffic that other articles have then you will be more likely to get more work from that employer and you will be able to command a higher rate. As important as SEO is to online writing success, most online writers still ignore it to some degree or another.
Even More Money!
Finally, if you are writing articles for sites like Yahoo, Helium or any site that employs a pay-per-view pay scale, remember to use great SEO. Because those sites pay based on views, the better your SEO, the more people will see the articles. Not only that but the more views you have the better the offers will be for upfront and premium assignments. These sites all know which writers are being seen.
SEO is a game and like any game knowing the rules is most of the battle. Put them into place and you can watch your earnings soar.
