How an awareness of SEO can make you money
This thought occurred to me today as I was writing a batch of articles for a client. It was one of those jobs where you aren’t given any article titles to work from; they just give you a list of their best performing keywords and the rest is up to you. Sometimes that makes the job easier, and sometimes it doesn’t!
But it did make me think about my opinion of SEO – search engine optimisation – when I first started writing for online markets. Basically, I didn’t have an opinion – because I didn’t know what SEO was.
Say hello to SEO!
Now admittedly I still know a lot less than many of these ‘web gurus’ you bump into online. But I know the basics and then some. And it has undoubtedly helped me in my online writing career. You see, there are so many people around that need articles and blog posts written in order to attract traffic to their website. And if you can write those articles, you’ll be in high demand as a web writer.
The instructions I get for various SEO writing jobs vary a lot. Sometimes I’ll get a list of keywords. On other occasions I have had very specific details, telling me exactly what percentage of keywords the article has to have, and where exactly they should be placed. It was all quite daunting at first, but now I can accommodate (and perhaps more importantly understand) why clients are very specific with their needs.
But here’s what I wanted to tell you – my learning curve has really been self taught. I stumbled over SEO and so I looked it up to find out more about it. And as I learned and got my first few SEO writing jobs, so they led to others, and to more knowledge about this aspect of online writing.
So if this is new to you, try doing some research on it yourself. Let me get you off to a good start by recommending this multi-part article on SEO Chat. And don’t worry if it doesn’t all make sense at first – it didn’t to me either!
But it does now.
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A couple months ago I too received a SEO writing assignment from a client who only gave me the keywords to work with. I knew how to perform the research and was able to come up with a great title that includes the most important keyword phrase, but personally, I enjoy the SEO assignments where the clients give specific details. What about you? Which SEO assignments do you like more?
By the way, you did a wonderful job writing this post. Keep up the good work and may the Lord bless you with lots of success!
First of all, thanks for the positive feedback! I’m not sure I favour one type of SEO writing over the other really – sometimes it’s easier having titles from the client if it is a subject you aren’t quite as familiar with. But other times it’s nice to do some research and come up with your own titles. Having a mix of both types of job is what I like the best I think!