Get Paid to Write Online - The Beginners Guide 3/3

Writing online is different from writing in a magazine, newspaper, or creatively, because in order for someone to see what you’ve written, they must find it somehow. That’s where search engines come in; they will index web content and then rank different articles and webpages based on the relevancy, quality, and keywords that are used on that page.This guide will go over the basics of SEO, and how to write proper SEO content, as well as a handful of tips and examples of good SEO written compared to bad SEO writing, but SEO is a broad topic, and entire books have been dedicated to figuring out how to best show up on the first page of Google. Here are a few links to some resources that should help you out:

· SEOmoz: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO – I found this guide helpful because it explained the basics to me while still going in-depth about the mechanics behind search engines and what you can do to help your writing’s rankings.

· How to Improve SEO Ranking – This article details how to improve the SEO ranking of content through your writing alone; basically, how to adjust your formatting and style so that search engines rank it highly.

· 55 Quick SEO Tips – This list of quick tips is essential to anyone who is confused of what to do and how to do it. The list is long, and detailed enough to help you piece together a plan of action to build the SEO value of your content.

Anyway, if you want to open those links in another tab, or just come back to them later, we’re going to go over the basics of how to write your content so that search engines will rank them over the competition, and some things to do to build the SEO ranking of articles once you’ve finished writing them.

Keywords

Before you start to write an article, pick 3-5 keywords that you want to target in your writing. These are words that you think people will search for, and will increase your traffic as your content will rank higher in those searches. Keep in mind that you don’t want to have a high keyword density, where keywords are crammed into the article so that it destroys the flow of the writing. This will come across as spam, and your articles will be penalized in search results. Thankfully, you don’t have to guess what terms are searched or not: this tool by Google shows you how many searches are made with each search term, or keyword, each month, and can show how many searches come from a certain country: Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Formatting

When writing an article, how you format your content is almost as important as what the content is actually about. Putting subtitles above certain sections (if you’ve noticed, I’ve been doing this throughout the entire guide) is good SEO because it shows search engines that you are clearly dividing your content so that it is well organized and easy to read, and most of the time (with exceptions, I know) these subheadings are actually keywords that you want to target, which can improve the keyword density (how many times keywords appear in your article) without spamming keywords everywhere.

Pictures and Media

Include them! You must include pictures and videos, some form of media, to keep your readers interested and increase how long they stay on the page. This is called the ‘bounce rate’ of the article, and it measures how long readers stay on your content before ‘bouncing’ away to another URL. Pictures help users understand what you’re trying to explain, increase the amount of attention they’re paying to what you’re saying, or maybe just give your readers something pretty to look at. Either way, if it keeps them on the page longer, it’s working!

Length

The length of your article will affect how it is indexed by search engines. Search engines like Google have an optimal sort of range, where 100-200 words is too short, and over 1000 is too long for an article. This should be taken as a rule of thumb, and not a law to follow to the letter; some short articles garner massive attention, while some optimal length articles (i.e. 400-800 words long) are almost unnoticed. If you think that an article is becoming too long, a good idea would be to break the article into a series of different articles and link to each of them at the end of each part (see back linking, the next section) to increase the amount of people you have reading your content.

Backlinking

One of the most important factors of SEO is backlinking (ironically, despite its importance, it’s not actually considered a real word by Word). Backlinking refers to the number of ‘do follow’ links that send users to your content. But wait, back up, what’s ‘do follow’? Quite simply, there are two types of links out there: ‘do follow’, and ‘no follow’. Do follow links will increase SEO ranking; no follow links will not. That’s the only difference. Most links are do follow, so linking to your articles from other articles, social bookmarking sites (which we’ll go over next), and other websites will increase the SEO ranking of your content as well as driving traffic to the linked content; a win-win situation.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking refers to taking a link to an article, news story, video, or some other form of online content, and posting that link on a site where other users can comment, rate, and discuss that content. There are a number of different sites where you can do this, and their benefit is twofold; firstly, they drive a lot of traffic to your content, which can convert into more ad revenue, and secondly, they can help improve SEO ranking of your article, hence driving more traffic from search engines like Google and Bing to your content, giving you more ad revenue. Keep in mind that spamming these sites with your article links will likely garner you a lot less traffic than if you actively participate in the community and build a reputation on that site. Here’s a list of the most popular social bookmarking sites:

· Stumbleupon

· Digg

· Reddit

· Delicious

· Mixx

· Newsvine

There are a large number of other social bookmarking sites out there that could potentially help your SEO ranking and drive more traffic to your articles, but the three that I have had the most success with are Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Digg, in that order. Experiment, and see which ones work out the best for you!

So now that you know the basic parameters of SEO, and know which site you want to write for, as well as having a few places to share your work with the world, you’re set! And please, if you enjoyed this guide, share it on a social bookmarking site? It would help me out, as you now know ;).