Wednesday, October 1, 2008

SEO and Internet Based Marketing

By joe cotroneo

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) is a method of making a website easier to find via search engines. A lot of this has to do with the way that the content of a website is written. When properly optimized, a website, article or blog can be found easily by a web user searching for relevant words or phrases - without having to look through the literally millions of websites in the net for what they are trying to find.

This is a very basic explanation of what search engine optimization is and of its purpose. But what does all of this mean for you as a writer? Well, it should give you a good idea of how the use of these words and phrases which people enter into search engines when they are looking for something is important to making the content that you write easier to find on the web. These search terms are known as key words and key phrases in the field of writing content for search engine optimization.

When you use these terms throughout your writing, they are far more likely to be found by people searching for these phrases. Let's say that you are writing an article about fly fishing. For the purposes of search engine optimization, it's best to use the phrase "fly fishing" in the article, since this is likely to be the phrase which your target audience will be searching for. How many times should you use this phrase in your article? If you are writing this piece for someone else, then that is entirely up to your client's preferences. You will see articles which are written with SEO in mind that might contain the keyword or key phrase only in the title and others which use the keyword as many as 25 times! It's all up to the client's specifications with regards to the placement of keywords in the article or articles.

Should you use a single keyword in this article or a group of keywords which are relevant to each other? This will again depend on what the client wants. You're not the only one working with the client in many cases; your client may be subcontracting this work to you and have clients of their own who have criteria that they want met with the article. Freelance writers see a lot of this situation; for instance, a set of articles to be written for search engine optimization which come with a detailed set of instructions for how they are to be written. When there are instructions, you should try to follow them as closely as humanly possible.

These instructions tend to be clear and easy enough to follow, with no follow up information needed from the client. However, when your business is writing content for search engine optimization purposes, you will in occasion have a situation where you may need some clarification from a client; in these cases, you should contact them as soon as possible to ensure that there is no delay in delivery and that the article or articles will be ones which your client is pleased with.

About the Author:

No comments: