What Is Freelance SEO Writing?
Learn how to get started.
SEO writing is one of the newer forms of freelance writing spawned by the Internet Age, and as such, it is an excellent, if sometimes frustrating, a way for new writers to get their feet wet in the freelance writing scene. SEO writing requires some imagination and engineering grit, but if you enjoy puzzles, freelancing as an SEO writer may be for you.
Introduction to SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) dates back to the early days of the Internet. When early Internet marketers realized they could manipulate search engine rankings with meaningless content and keywords, a flood of keyword stuffed web pages swept across the Internet, all to propel their content and the products they sold to the top of search engine lists.
This increased user traffic and potential profits significantly. It wasn’t unusual to come across web pages with only a few short paragraphs of copy and large, seemingly blank areas of space. However, highlighting these blank areas of space with a cursor reveals massive strings of hidden keywords.
To rank a webpage higher in search engines for nearly any remotely relevant search term, SEO writers used to embed invisible keywords in text.
Fortunately for good web design, search engine programmers discovered this flaw and refined their search engines to ignore obvious “keyword stuffing.” This significant change has caused search engines to rank web pages based on the actual content rather than keyword stuffing.
Content providers responded by developing SEO writing, which aims to achieve the same results as open keyword stuffing while also providing a better designed, better written page.
It’s a “best of both worlds” compromise: content providers who invest in SEO writing keep their high search engine rankings, while readers benefit from more smoothly integrated and keyword dense text.
There are both bad and good SEO writers.
Bad SEO writers are unaware of how search engines work and will attempt to stuff text with ten or twenty commonly used search terms (“sex,” “money,” and so on) ten or twenty times apiece, without regard for whether the actual text reads well. These days, search engines are sophisticated enough to ignore obvious keyword-stuffing efforts, a defense that only good SEO practice can overcome.
A skilled SEO writer:
1. Uses only one or two search terms per page.
2. Uses unique, natural-language search terms.
3. Integrates search terms smoothly with text.
The results are what distinguishes a good SEO writer from a bad one. Good SEO writers can deliver tangible results in search rankings. Their SEO writing skills keep the client’s web pages on the first page of search engine results, generating additional revenue.
Bad SEO writers don’t keep client pages on the first page of search engine results; they create nearly unreadable, transparently phony text, and they’re underpaid. If you want to be a successful freelance SEO writer, you must first learn how to be a good one.
The hard part of SEO writing
The most difficult aspect of good SEO writing is often writing integrated text. Each search term should be used once or twice in a 250-word block of copy. This is fine if your search term is “bond portfolio,” but what happens if your search term is “high-yield gold investment bond package bonds”?
This is where the “puzzle” aspect of SEO writing comes into play: you must find a way to make your search term sound natural, no matter how long it is. Skilled SEO writers use the following tricks for difficult keyword phrases:
1. Enclosing the search term in quotation marks (to make it appear as a precise technical term rather than a clunky phrase); and
2. Defining the term at the start of the article and using it throughout, or drawing parallels between two SEO terms (requiring you to refer to both frequently).
There are no hard and fast rules for effectively integrating keywords; each keyword set is unique, and each article has unique requirements. However, with a little imagination, you can make your prose read naturally while still being SEO-friendly. Just remember the other main rule: don’t stuff keywords into text, but rather space them out evenly throughout the text.
Who has SEO writing jobs available?
Almost any company with enough money and willingness to maintain a strong web presence. Take care with the keyword lists you create. In general, if the client has a lengthy keyword list and requires numerous keywords in his text, most search engines will rank his webpage low, and you may not be able to achieve the desired results.
You’ll probably need to take some of these jobs at some point to establish yourself as a freelance SEO writer (and to get some much-needed practice in SEO writing). Examine freelance writing message boards, and classified ads, and contact local businesses that have a web presence or who you believe is ready to develop one. Companies with new websites have a good chance of benefiting from the services of an experienced SEO writer.
Conclusion
Keep at it, learn the tricks, and keep in mind that SEO writing is a highly sought-after skill. Once you’ve established a reputation for yourself, you can regularly command higher prices and higher profile (yet easier) assignments.
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