by Christian Arno

Writing content that is both reader and search engine friendly can be a bit of a juggling act. These two aspects of web writing are certainly not mutually exclusive, but getting the balance right can be tricky.

With the vast amount of content on the web clamouring for people’s attention, it’s important that people can actually find your site to begin with, and effective use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques can be instrumental in driving traffic your way. It’s no use having the most wonderful, engaging prose if no one ever sees it, but once people are at your site you have to be able to both grab and keep their attention.

What is SEO?

SEO or search engine optimisation is simply the process of improving the visibility of your website in the rankings of the major search engines. If you run a specialist music blog or a website for a company that restores antique furniture, you’ll want your website to appear as close to the top of the search results as possible whenever someone searches for a relevant term.

Factors such as back-linking (establishing links with other websites relevant to your content) are important in SEO, but the effective use of keywords is probably the single most important aspect, and is certainly the most relevant when it comes to writing copy.

Keyword research and placement

Keywords are the words or phrases that people actually put into the search engine when looking for relevant sites. A difference can be drawn between ‘short tail’ and ‘long tail’ keywords. A short tail keyword is typically short and simple, commonly used and generalised. More people will use the term but there will also be more competition from other websites. An example of a short tail keyword could be ‘furniture restorers’.

A long tail keyword is more involved and specific. An example could be ‘antique pine restoration in Sheffield’. This will yield fewer searches overall but there is less competition on long tail keywords and they generally have better conversion rates, meaning people who visit the site actually follow up on the services or products offered. Ideally, you should use a combination of short tail and long tail keywords.

Keywords should be placed in titles, subheadings and within the body of the text, but don’t over-use or ‘spam’ keywords. Early search engines simply counted the number of times search terms occurred on a page, but the algorithms used by Google and other search engines today are more sophisticated, and spamming keywords can be counter-productive, as well as affecting the quality of the copy.

Keyword tips

• Hold a brainstorming session to find the most relevant terms. Don’t forget colloquialisms, abbreviations and regional variations.
• Run your terms through Google’s keyword tool to check their effectiveness and levels of competition.
• Revise your keywords regularly. The search terms that people commonly use are not static and can in fact change with surprising speed.

Writing for the web

Writing for the web differs from writing for print and other media. A screen is harder on the eyes than the printed page and users tend to scan more, looking for important information that proves the page is relevant before reading in-depth.

Web writing tips

• Break the text into small, easily digestible chunks.
• Put the most important information close to the top and preferably in the first couple of lines.
• Use subheadings to break the copy into sections.

Writing for your audience

While the above guidelines hold true in most situations, the nature of your website and its audience will also dictate the style of your copy to a large extent. Are you writing for an academic or highly knowledgeable audience looking for in-depth analysis? Hardcore technophiles who appreciate technical specifications and understand jargon? Casual surfers who might need walking through the services you offer or the topic you’re writing about? Keeping the audience in mind will inform both your use of language and the format in which it’s presented.

In general, a more knowledgeable audience will be more inclined to read through involved, complex prose, but unless you want your site to have an air of exclusivity (and fewer consequent visitors) you should also cater for less knowledgeable visitors. An easily accessible introduction or overview of your topic, products or services can easily be linked to more in-depth copy. Also remember that even academically-orientated copy is easier to read online when broken into sections and presented in an orderly and attractive manner.

It’s not always easy to balance content that is both SEO and reader friendly. Even experienced writers coming from another field can struggle with the format at first, but it’s an important balance to strike for anyone wanting their web content to be both visible and effective.

About the author
Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of professional translation company Lingo24, experts in the foreign language internet. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over sixty million words for businesses in every industry sector. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.

(Photo: avrdreamer)

Sharon Hurley Hall has been a friend for years. She is one of the best ‘self taught’ SEOs I’ve ever met. Not only can she market her websites – without understanding the methodologies behind bibliometrics and Latent Semantic Indexing – but her name is a ‘keyword string’ related to ‘get paid to write’ in both Google Search and Google AdWords. That is why I thought of her blog when I found this new tool.

Sharon is always teaching writers how to promote their websites with a clarity and simplicity that I find difficult. However, very few tools can be used by the average website owner to track their search engine results. Even the free SEO software packages can take weeks to learn how to use, and months to understand the significance of the data produced.

I found www.cuterank.net this morning and immediately thought of Sharon and her readers. It is a free little script, perfect for anyone with only a few websites and blogs. It lets you track your ‘rank’ in any of Google’s search engines.

Have you ever run a ranking report that stated you were at the top of Google – but you couldn’t find your website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Position). This little tool lets you pick any Google search engine and find your rank specifically – or find your ranking on a large selection of websites.

IT also tells you if you are in the top 100. This is very important. If you have a keyword in the top 100 – then you have done the ‘hard part’ of SEO. Once in the Top 100, just continue creating blog posts with a keyword density between 2 -4%, but a Keyword Weight of 70% or higher. Density is the number of times a keyword appears. Weight is the value of each keyword.

This is easier than it sounds. The average blog post has 400 words including title, links, menu, and footer.

First: Never use more than 4 keywords on a page. In fact, using only 2 keywords makes it easier to achieve a high Keyword Weight.

The keyword should always appear in the URL, Page Title, Meta Tags, and Description. Next, include the keyword in the Article Title. Your URL, Page Title, and Article Title do not need to repeat themselves.

Second: Add the keyword to the first 50 words of the page, the last 50 words. Hyperlink one of these to a relevant page on your blog.

This is all the average blog needs to generate a Keyword Weight over 70%. This is the first step to reaching the top 100 Keyword Positions.

Keep Track of the keywords and run them through www.cuterank.net . There is no upgrades, no members section. You do not need to buy a better version to see all your results.

Suzanne James is a professional search engine marketer. Find out more at Axiom9.

Editor’s Note: When I agreed to publish this guest post, I had no idea I was going to be heaped with praise – thanks, Suz.

Disclosure: I have received no compensation for publishing this review post.

Write Really Great Keyword Articles is today’s post from Dana Prince’s Writer’s Blog. I read this blog every day and it’s one of my favourites. This post will tell you why.

When you get an assignment that involves ten of the same keyword or twenty or more,it can feel like a bottomless pit at the start. How on earth can I write 10 keyword articles about a common word such as Google with a 1.5% keyword density?

Dana doesn’t just ask the question, she provides the answer and it’s easy to implement. If you’ve ever flagged when writing keyword articles, Write Really Great Keyword Articleswill help you.

I’m falling in love with TodayBooks.com. This might be the honeymoon period, because I’ve just had my second book listed with them. And it’s one that’s grown out of this very blog. Remember when I did a series of posts on search engine optimization and website promotion? Well, that turned into a presentation for Inspired Author. One day when I had not much else to do, I converted the presentation into a Word document and sent it to TodayBooks.

A couple of weeks later I got back an email that said that they liked the book but felt it was a bit thin. Who could blame them? After all, it WAS based on a bullet point presentation, so I knew it was light on content. But sending them the presentation gave them the chance to assess whether it was something they would publish. After I thought about it for a while, I decided to beef it up by including some of my original blog posts from here, generalised so they didn’t just apply to writers. This book is the result of the combination.

The whole process has taken several weeks. TodayBooks are extremely slow at responding to email. What I like about them is that if they think changes are needed they tell me. They also promote the book on the home page. Most importantly, I get an ISBN, so I can list my book with Amazon and others.

There’s one thing I thought they could have done better. The suggested a new title and asked me to write sales copy. I had no problem with that – after all, if I wasn’t prepared to promote my own book, why should they? But … they’ve changed the title again and they didn’t change the sales copy to match. That’s why the title of the book is SEO Tricks but the sales copy refers to Web Page Action. That’s a bit careless, I think.

All in all, I’m happy. I’ve got my second ebook out and it’s a general one that I can promote heavily. It will look great in my profile on IFreelance and other places. And I may make some pocket money from it, too

Last week I told you in detail how I optimized my website, based on the excellent advice from Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. So how has it been going?

Stats on the rise

Swimmingly, as they say in the UK. This month, I’ve had more than 20,000 hits and, more importantly, more than 16,000 page views. That’s 7 pages a visitor (double what I was told a good count would be). About 40% of my visitors are staying longer than 30 seconds. That’s good, but there’s no time to rest on my laurels. I’ve still got to find a way to keep the other 60% on my site for longer. I’m learning a few more techniques that I’ll share with you once I’ve seen how they work out.

Using my traffic

So what am I going to do with all this traffic? Launch a monthly newsletter, of course. The newsletter will be available from the end of March and will contain freelance writing tips, resources and articles. I’m also going to add more free-to-reprint articles to my site to keep visitors interested in what I have to offer.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Related posts:
How I Put My Site On Steroids
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Research
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Placement
SEO: What’s Under The Hood?
There’s Life Beyond Google
How To Keep Your Website Traffic
Quickish Fix

For the past week I’ve been sharing with you everything I know about website development and promotion. If you’ve been following the series, then skip to the next section to see which of these strategies have worked best for me. If not, then here’s a recap:

Website Optimization And Promotion

First, I looked at why it’s important to do keyword research and where you can find free tools to help you do it. I then looked at how you can place keywords within metatags. Visitors to your site may not see them, but the search engines certainly will! Third, there was the importance of cross-linking, the use of a sitemap to help search engines find all your content, and the use of a robots.txt file to be in control of who is allowed to search your site. Part four considered other tools for site promotion, including directory submission and deep submission of particularly interesting links. Article marketing was the subject of part five and I highlighted a couple of ways to use this strategy to best effect. Part six gave you additional options for promotion, including networking, syndication with RSS, tagging and keeping the content fresh.

Site Promotion Quick Fix

I’ll admit that all this promotion is a slow process. It’s taken me nearly eight months to get my traffic to its current levels. But if you don’t have a lot of time, here’s my quick fix solution. These are the strategies that have proved most effective and have brought the most traffic to my site.

• Write articles for Ezinearticles
• Distribute the same articles through Article Marketer
• Blog about the issues in your articles and link back to your articles or site
• This will create inbound links and regular fresh content for your site.
• Watch your hits and page views rise and find your site in the search engines.

Best of luck, and thanks for reading.

Related posts:
How I Put My Site On Steroids
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Research
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Placement
SEO: What’s Under The Hood?
There’s Life Beyond Google
How To Keep Your Website Traffic

A little submissiveness goes a long way, especially when you’re talking about website promotion. Once you’ve finished all the on-page optimization of your site, by doing keyword research, keyword placement and creating a sitemap, it’s time to get the word out to Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. Haven has a tip on search engine submission, which has the submission addresses for Google, Yahoo and MSN. As Haven points out, you only need to submit the main – or index – page of your site; if you’ve got a good sitemap, the search engines will do the rest – eventually.

Beyond Google, Yahoo and MSN

It can take a while for your site to show up on the ‘Big 3′ (Google is a particularly tough nut to crack), so there are a few strategies you can use to improve your chances. Google, Yahoo and MSN also crawl other search engines, so submitting to some of the lesser known ones (which are likely to list you faster) will help to get you on their list. A resource I found really useful was WebCEO, free software that automates website management and tracking. It includes keyword and page optimisation tools and a very good submission tool. (See Gracepub’s review)

What else can I do to promote my website?

Glad you asked. You can also submit your website to relevant directories, and I know of another free resource that will help you to do it. The SEO friendly directory list catalogues directories by interest and country and includes PageRank information for each directory listed. That means you can decide which directories are worth bothering with. I started with the 9s and 8s and worked my way down to the 3s and subnmitted my site to so many directories that I’ve forgotten which ones they are. Be warned, this will take time, as in many cases you’ll have to submit your site manually. But if you’re listed by external websites, Google, Yahoo and MSN will start to like you.

How can I make the most of this site promotion strategy?

Resubmit your site every six months to keep the listing fresh and practice deep submission – submitting links to individual pages that you think are important. (Samishra has a good post on this.) This works for blogs, too. I have submitted the URLs for most of my posts and they show up on Google (if you click on ‘show omitted results’).

One final tip: you might want to set up a disposable email address just for site submission, because you will get a LOT of email. You’ll also find that you’ve been subscribed to lots of site promotion newsletters, most of which are a waste of time, IMHO. I set up a new one on my domain and once I’ve confirmed my directory listing, I can then ignore everything else that comes to that address.

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In Keyword Placement, I talked about using keywords in metatags and content to optimize your website. Now we’re going to extend the strategy a bit further. Remember that you can highlight keywords within the text on your page. To make your site more search-engine friendly some of these keywords into links going further into your site. This will tell Google, Yahoo and MSN and other search engines which have found your home page that there’s something else to look at.

Why do I need links to optimize my website?

Google, Yahoo and MSN and other search engines like pages with lots of links. Inbound links are best (those are links from other sites to your page) – and will improve your PageRank quickly, but cross-linking of pages within your site is also good. Cross-linking shows that different pages of your website are relevant to each other – and relevance is a big factor in improving PageRank. If you know what you want to do with your site, this will be an easy step to take.

Why do I need a sitemap?

A sitemap is one of the best ways of letting the search engines find the rest of your site. You should have a link to it off your home page and it should contain links to all the pages you want the search engines to find. A sitemap makes it easy for search engines and users to find everything on your site.

If you have a big site, this can take a while, but luckily there are lots of free tools that will do it for you.

Freefind provides a sitemap and free (ad-sponsored) search box for your site. Their free service will create a sitemap page, which you can customise to suit your web template. They will also search your site at specified intervals and update the sitemap. If you use the search box, they will also provide statistics about what visitors to your website searched for. The ads are quite unobtrusive, but if you don’t want them you can upgrade to the paid service.

You can also create a special Google Sitemap (here’s why) and upload it to your server. Two free online services are:

• Sitemapspal
• Online Sitemap Creator

You can also download Google’s own Sitemap Generator.

How else can search engines find my site?

Some search engines look for a special file called a robots.txt file. This stays on your server and tells it which search engines can search your site and which can’t. The reason to have one is so that you can block any search engine bots that bring spam in their wake. (This is only a basic level of protection, which relies on spam bots respecting the boundaries you have set.) However, you can also specify which folders search engines are allowed to spider just in case you’re storing anything confidential on your server.

You can create a robots.txt file here then upload it to your server. It also provides an example of a robots.txt file.

How can I use this on my blog?

Even if you don’t host your own blog, you can use some of these techniques to improve its position in the search engines. You can certainly highlight certain keywords and link them to other posts you have made – and you can do an index post, which links to all your posts (or to all posts in a certain category). Haven has a good example here. If your webhost is providing your blog software, then you can also use a robots.txt file.

On-site links, a sitemap and a robots.txt file are all useful tools in search engine optimization, but there’s still more you can do to get your site noticed. In part four, I’ll look at strategies and tools for search engine submission.

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Optimizing your website content so it is found easily by Google, Yahoo and MSN doesn’t have to cost you anything. In Part 1, I listed some free tools to do keyword research. Now I’m going to show you how to make those keywords work for you. Search engines search text and rely on metatags to come up with the titles and descriptions they list in their search results. Metatags can be seen when you select ‘View, Source’ in your browser menu. They are found in the head section of the page.

What are the most important metatags?

The main ones are:
title This comes up at the top of your browser and is the first line of your entry on a Google search. This should be short, or the most important aspects should be at the start
description: This comes up as the second part of your Google, Yahoo or MSN listing. Your description should be relevant to the site content
keywords: this is where you put the keywords that you found in Part 1. It is usually best to put a few, relevant keywords, rather than cram in as many as you can type. Search engines usually downgrade you if they perceive that your keywords are not relevant. When I researched my own site, I found that people searching for freelance writers also search for ‘write articles’; those searching for ghostwriters also searched for ‘write your life story’, so I’ve included those in my metatags.

Where else can I put keywords?

You can also put keywords into
author: put your name and company name here; people will use these to search for you.
alt tags: these are used to give additional information about images. When you hover your mouse over an image the text you sometimes see is contained in the alt tags. You can put keywords in these as well. They are also indexed by search engines.

Example: hover your mouse over the picture on any WritingUp blog. The text you see is in an alt tag.

How do I put keywords into my website content?

So far, so good. Now you need to make those same keywords part of your content (again, avoiding putting too many in an obvious way). Make a list of the keywords you want to use, then start to write your page content, using the most important keywords a couple of times each.

Tip: One of the ways you can make search engines take more notice of these keywords is by using emphasis. Heading tags (h1, h2, h3), strong or b (to make text bold) highlight the parts of the page you think are worth paying attention to and Google, Yahoo and MSN will take notice of them too.

Now you know how to find relevant keywords for SEO and what to do with them once you’ve got them. In part three, I’ll look at another technique for on-page search engine optimisation.

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Search engine optimization (SEO) costs money. There are lots of people out there who will charge you lots of money to make sure that Google, Yahoo and MSN will find your website. But when I wanted to increase my search engine ranking a few months ago, I didn’t have the budget to pay anyone to do it for me. What I needed was a do-it-yourself approach to website promotion. I did some reading, tried a few things and realised that it was easy to promote my site myself if I could devote a couple of hours a week to doing it properly. This is how I started:

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of making it easy for Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines to find and index your pages. The easier it is for search engines to find your pages, the more likely it is that someone will come to your website and offer you work or buy a product you’ve offered for sale. SEO increases traffic to your site or blog and, in the case of WritingUp, makes it more likely that someone will click on your ads and rack up those Adsense earnings.

How do I optimize my website?

If you’re launching a site from scratch, you start with keyword research. If you’re updating an old site, start with keyword research. If you want to bring traffic to your blog (and can write about anything), start with … (you get the idea). You need to think about what keywords best describe your website, business or blog and what similar keywords people are looking for on Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.

What will keyword research cost me?

Zilch. Zip. Nada. Bupkes. You can pay if you want to, but there are a few free tools you can use that will work well if you’re on a tight budget. They are:

Overture
Wordtracker/Overture
Adwords analyzer

These tools are simple to use. You type the keywords you want into the form, enter and you get back a list of related keywords or the number of times those keywords have been searched in the past month. Once you’ve identified the keywords that are best for you, you need to put them into your page content. This is covered in Part 2 of the series.
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