Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Learn the Basics of Writing for the Internet Audience—Part One Keywords

Learn the basics of writing for the Internet audience and you'll never lack for writing assignments.

Pretty strong statement, but in this day and time it's one you can count on. Look at an anonymous business owner with me and I think you'll see what I mean. We'll call him Joe and he's a plumber.

He's a smart business owner and named his business, ABC Plumbing. He chose carefully because with that name, he had a good chance of being the first listing in the directory under plumbers. That was ten years ago and that ad in the telephone directory kept him supplied with customers while it made him visible around the community. But as time went by, fewer people looked at the Yellow Pages when they needed a plumber. Instead they looked online.

Well Joe is a with-it sort of guy, and he had a website built. It wasn't fancy, but it did the job, just like the old ad in the directory. Actually the two looked a lot alike. But Joe began to see his traffic and customer base diminish. This was due to the fact that when someone searched on the Internet for a plumber in his area, his website didn't come up first. In fact, it didn't come up until page three of the search.

He did some research and found that he needed to add some things to his site to come up higher in the search engine. He came face-to-face with the new acronym SEO. Search Engine Optimization became his key to getting the name out about his business. So he started a blog and began tweaking the information on his site. But all this began to eat into the time he spent running a business.

At this point, the light bulb came on. Joe realized he was a plumber, not a writer. And this is where we come in. We can provide valuable services to businesses small and large. We can do what we do best—write—while allowing them to get on with business.

On with the Basics
The first term you need to become familiar with is Keywords.
A keyword is like a label. It's a short way—although almost always more than one word in length—to state the purpose of your article. Articles can have several keyword groups or only one. I only have one main keyword group for this article and it's Writing for the Internet. You'll see this keyword in the labels following this post. You'll also see some related keywords, Internet, Internet Audience, Learn the Basics of Writing for the Internet, How to use Keywords Effectively. 

I use groups of words because the point of the keywords is to direct the searcher to your website. You want your keywords to match, as closely as possible, what someone types into a search engine search box. People rarely type just one word because it gives too many options.

Here are the guidelines for using keywords effectively:

  • Always use the keywords in the title.
  • Repeat the keywords at least once in the first 50 words of your article.
  • Spread the use of the keywords naturally and evenly throughout the rest of the article. (In a 400 word article that would mean using the keywords a minimum of three more times)

Learning how to use keywords effectively can make you invaluable to business owners, and for your own website. Over the next few weeks, every Tuesday, I'll continue this series on Writing for the Internet Audience.

I'd love to hear some of the aspects of this topic you'd like to see covered. Post your questions in the comments section and I'll make sure I cover them.

And...
Don't forget to join the conversation!
Blessings
Edie

You can jump to Part Two of Learn the Basics of Writing for the Internet here.


32 comments:

  1. Edie,
    Thank you for this! Those of us who are new at blogging on the internet need to keep these reminders before us. Thanks for doing such a good job. I appreciate it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glenda, thanks for the kind words! Blessings, E

      Delete
  2. Hi Edie - great advice!
    How would we be writing for the entrepreneurs? Would we write on their existing site? What if they don't have one? I don't have a blog for plumbing, y'know? In future posts will you be covering how we would initially contact a business person to offer our services? I look forward to reading this series every week to learn more. I think this will be a great way to generate more writing business, and help the business owners build their business, too! Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Colleen, great questions. I'll be showing you how to reach out to potential clients and do work for them on their existing sites. I definitely don't expect each of us to start a stable of blogs. You will have the expertise, by the end of the series, to guide a business owner in setting up a blog. I won't be going into website building (since I don't know how to do that) but you will get what you need to generate some income. Blessings, E

      Delete
  3. Great info, as always, Edie. This is something I know I need to do better. Thanks for your help!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Vonda, thanks for stopping by. And believe me, it's something we all need to do better. Blessings, E

      Delete
  4. Great article. I'm looking forward to the whole series. I used to blog regularly and need to get back into it as part of my platform development.

    Thanks for the timely help.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Patricia, thanks for stopping by. I hope this series help out! Blessings, E

      Delete
  5. Great information, Edie. Bookmarking this post!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pat, thanks so much! BTW, congratulations! Blessings, E

      Delete
  6. Edie,
    Saw this on Vonda's page and found it to be one of the most concise articles I've ever read about SEO's. I wonder what you might suggest to recover from a google Panda update. That bear cut my traffic almost in half. I did some things in ignorance that I've since learned not to do, but need to recover now. Thanks, Bev Varnado

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Beverly, thanks for stopping by - I'm glad you've found it valuable! I know a lot of people who got bit by the bear. I took a look at your site and it's in really good shape. I think you need to continue on with key wording and generating great content. One thing you might want to add is to caption your pictures. Images alone aren't searchable on search engines, but if you have an image with a caption you will actually get a higher search engine ranking. All these things will begin to snowball and you'll find yourself further along than you were. Blessing, E

      Delete
    2. I'd wondered about that, but didn't know if it'd help. Great suggestion! Thanks much.!

      Delete
  7. Edie, thanks for this post! I'm looking forward to this series. Is this something I could, and should pursure-writing for businesses? I'd love to get started in that to make a little extra income (maybe my family won't think I'm nuts that way) but have never known how to get started. Love you my precious friend!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jamie, I definitely think this is something you could do. Stay tuned for the rest of the series and make your decision then. Blessings, E

      Delete
  8. Very much looking forward to this series. I soooo need it. Thanks for the keyword explanations in the past two articles. I'm going to try it to try and build my audience. I've been doing one-word tags and my headlines have been more creative than keyword driven.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Teresa, it's hard to change our way of thinking as writers. We were all taught clever titles get attention and in this new paradigm there's a shift. One thing I'm recommending writers do with their clever titles (which I personally love and don't want to lose) is to use it as a subtitle. My friend, Michelle Lim is a master at this. Her site is www.thoughtsonplot.wordpress.com. (This link won't show up as clickable in the comments, but just copy and paste it into your browser to visit) Blessings, E

      Delete
    2. Thanks so much for the shout out, Edie! Great article! I learned everything I know about blogging from you, friend.

      Delete
  9. Looking forward to the rest of the articles. Going to start paying more attention to KEYWORDS in my posts. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mary, thanks for stopping by! Your blog is growing by leaps and bounds, adding keywords is really going to ramp up the growth. Blessings, E

      Delete
  10. I knew you'd teach me about SEO eventually! This was GREAT information. Thank you! :)

    ReplyDelete
  11. I've never really thought about the whole keyword GROUP before, but I never search one word. I always use a group of words when I search. One way to figure out my keyword group is to become the audience and do a search myself for the topic of my post. Hmmm....always making me think, aren't you?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Celeste, that's a great way to research keywords. You can also check what's trending on Twitter like I mentioned in last week's post. Stay tuned, there's more about SEO to come next Tuesday. Thanks for stopping by, Blessings, E

      Delete
  12. Great post, Edie. Love the way you're tackling SEO and making it easy to understand.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Susan! I'm going to put your blog in the resources section of this series. I love http://www.blogmamasusan.blogspot.com/. Blessings, E

      Delete
  13. Thank you for mapping this process out for me!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wendy, I'm glad to see you and I'm happy this helps. Blessings, E

      Delete
  14. Captions under images...clever titles as subtitles...all good stuff.
    I don't understand EVERYTHING that's always posted here, but I am learning a lot (one step at a time, right?)
    Thanks again, Edie. Got to go make some changes!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Sally, it's a process—no matter how far along you are! You should see my 'gotta make changes' list. Thanks for stopping by, Blessings, E

    ReplyDelete
  16. Thanks for all the good advice, Edie! Should all pictures have a caption or just pictures of people? Blessings on you and yours.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cathy, great question! All pictures should have a caption. This is vital for SEO, but also to make our blogs more accessible for those who are visually impaired. Thanks for stopping by, Blessings, E

      Delete
  17. this is the best SEO article i have ever read! thankyou for explaining this!

    ReplyDelete