Writing for the Internet - Top Tips for Using SEO

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is essentially how you make your website visible to people using search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. If you’re writing for the internet, be it your own website or blog or someone else’s, then it’s something you need to think seriously about before you start writing. Using SEO effectively means that your article will appear higher up in search engine results, and this means more people reading your articles online!

1. Use Keywords

Keywords tell a search engine what your article is about, so using keywords or key phrases is a great way to raise your place in the search engine results. When choosing your keywords, think about how you use a search engine and the kind of words and phrases you might use if you were looking for an article.

But be careful, it’s easy to overuse keywords at the expense of your article, and adding too many can make your work less effective and difficult to read. There are also penalties for writers who use too many keywords in an article, so packing in too many similar words and phrases could mean that your article is marked as spam.

2. Use Tags and Categories

If you find it difficult to work keywords in to the article itself, you can also add “tags”. Tags are words and phrases that you attach to your article, and they will direct readers who search for those words to your article or blog post. You can also help to improve your visibility by making sure that articles are properly categorised and easy to find.

3. Make use of Social Media

Sites like Facebook and Twitter are free and easy to use and allow you to promote your work to all of your friends and followers with just one click. When you post something new, make sure to Tweet about it and post a link on Facebook. Most people will check Facebook and Twitter regularly, so a post now and then might remind them to visit your blog or website and read your latest posts.

Also, make sure to make friends with other writers on social media sites. Like and share posts, retweet their links or mention them in a comment. If you’re lucky, they might return the favour.

4. Get organised!

Keep track of what works and what doesn’t, and write it down! Not everything you write will be a hit, and there might be some articles or blog posts that aren’t as successful as others. If you keep a note of the posts that do and don’t work, you might notice a pattern that can help you to improve in the future. No post is a failed post as long as you learn something from it, you’ll soon figure out what your readers like and what they don’t!

5. Know Your Readers

Once you’ve figured out what your readers want, make sure you use that information to your advantage. If you’ve posted something particularly popular, why not turn it in to a series? Think about what they would want to read, what questions they will have, and, most importantly, what they might search for. The key to effective SEO is having the answers to the questions people ask most often.