SEO: Mostly Writing?

I read over on Inklit the other day that the difference between an SEO and a writer is about $40 an hour. This quote made me smile, because the more I look into SEO, the more it looks to me like writing plays a crucial role. When I first started investigating SEO to promote my business, I thought it was an arcane, technical art I probably had little hope of understanding. But on further investigation, it seems like much of SEO is well within my skill set.

Am I ready to call myself an SEO yet? Not quite. But I am ready to start promoting myself as an SEO-knowledgeable writer; which I think will help me develop a USP. Could any of you writers out there be more SEO than you realize? Here are a few SEO-crucial skills that rely on writing, not mysterious technical wizardry.

Keyword-rich copy. Integrating keywords into your copy can help you position your pages to rank well with the search engines. Of course, many business owners get it wrong by simply spitting out keyword-stuffed copy that doesn't appeal to prospects. A strong writer can integrate keywords seamlessly into copy that persuades prospects to buy. But either way you go, it's writing.

Anchor text. Anchor text is the text you use to link to a site. Google counts the amount of times a certain keyword is used on other sites to link to yours, and this can affect your rankings for that keyword. But it's not as simple as throwing up a bunch of articles with anchor text that uses "freelance writer" to link to you. If you rank artificially high for a single phrase, it could count against you--so it's often smart to vary the phrases you use as links so they look as natural as possible. Finding the right anchor text is a writerly skill.

Linkbait. Linkbait is anything on your site that encourages others to link to you. It could be video, audio, or even online games--but often it takes the form of good old fashioned excellent content. Good writing is a large part of building excellent linkbait.

Article marketing. Article marketing can get the word out about your business, bring you links from high-PR sites, and generate traffic. And, um...they're articles. So they're writing. I've seen plenty of businesspeople throw crappy articles up on article marketing sites, but if you write them well, they can do much more for you. In fact, just recently I landed a large project because the business owner found one of my EzineArticles and asked if he could use it in one of his presentations.

Blogging. Blogs provide your website with fresh content that helps keep it high in the SERP's. A good blog also helps prospects get to know you and establishes you as an expert. Good writing is crucial to any blog. Many people tout frequency of posts as more important than content, but in my personal experience good writing is key. I spend an hour or more on each post, post three times a week, and get healthy traffic from this blog--it's also won industry awards and helped me connect with crucial networks. I can't stress enough how important good writing is to any blogging effort.

Title and meta tags. Title and meta tags are the most technical I get. These are found in your site's HTML code, and they determine what appears as the title to your site in search engines. They're also more important to keyword placement than keywords in your copy. Writing good title and meta tags that include crucial keywords and encourage users to click is an art form that writers are well-placed to master, once they learn the right format.

If you think SEO is something you can't master, think again. There may be more to SEO than writing--but writing is a crucial part of the process. If you're not calling yourself an SEO writer, maybe you should.

My Business Resolutions for 2008

It's almost the end of the year, and just about everyone is posting their New Years' Resolutions in cyberspace. I think this is a good idea--a whole bunch of people will see my resolutions, and they'll know if I don't follow through. Hopefully this means I'll be more driven to accomplish them--public shame is a great motivator.

What works better for me, however, is setting goals I can achieve. I'm a dreamer by nature. I love setting elaborate, fantastic, reach-for-the-stars goals. When I was in school, this worked pretty well--I was surrounded by a network of teachers and parents who would help me out. However, I'm finding that the key to adult success isn't necessarily dreaming big--anyone can do that. The key is to keep trudging along--a bunch of little achievements can add up to some big-time success.

Anyway, enough motivational blather. Here are my (eminently achievable) business goals for 2008:

Move this blog to Wordpress. I would really like to move this blog from its current Blogger location to my own URL: www.catalystwriters.com. There are a few reasons, but the biggest is that I think the continual updating on that URL will help my business site's Google rankings, plus make my blog look a bit more professional. I'd love to do a whole-site-in-Wordpress thing like Matt's site at Copywriter's Crucible, but I'm sticking to one thing at a time here.

Monetize this blog. I can't say this blog hasn't been a blast, but I'd have even more fun if I was generating some income from it. I think I'll give myself a few months to see if my current traffic levels will sustain--I got a big boost from the Top Ten Blogs for Writers awards. Then I'm going to start looking into ways to monetize that won't be too intrusive to readers. Expect a few surveys on which types of blog advertising you mind the least and the most while I figure this out.

Streamline my marketing routine. I have to admit, I haven't been experiencing the same slowdown I've seen Lori writing about at Words on the Page. I think part of the reason is that I'm lucky: right now I have two very regular clients who put in large orders each month, as well as a circulating stream of repeat clients who drop in every few months or so with new orders. Most of these folks I met through Elance--either by bidding or by keeping my profile up--which is why I stuck with the site all this time, in case anyone's wondering why I've bothered. But a few of them came to me through other marketing tactics--and some even found me through Search.

All this is great, but I'm very aware that my two regulars could take off at any time and my circulating regulars often do fade out--and they need to be reminded or replaced with new clients. My marketing habits are haphazard at best--I start thinking about it only during the slow months. Instead, I'd like to develop a streamlined process that I can apply continuously, so that there will always be more work waiting.

Look into some passive income streams. PLR has caught my attention lately, and I've been thinking about writing an E-book for ages. This year, I'd like to make a commitment to start developing some passive-income products I can sell on my site.

Continue with my article marketing campaign. It's been working well for me already, but I've been slacking off lately on article marketing. I've still got a long list of titles for articles I haven't written, and I think it's definitely doable to work through it this year and raise my site's Google rank even further.

This year has been great for my freelance writing business--I've accomplished a great deal. Here's hoping I can continue my progress in 2008.

I Rank, Therefore I Am

I've become obsessed with Google Analytics. Ever since I figured out that if you want the program to work you actually have to install the script on your site (yeah, I know; I'm hopeless), I check it at least once a day to see where my traffic's coming from. I do this for both my blog and my business site. When I first started tracking, my traffic was coming in through various links I'd gathered and some others who generously decided to link to my site on their own.

Then I started to notice traffic from Search coming in at my business site. The search terms didn't look like phrases used by potential buyers (which is my ideal scenario); they were things like "how to open a locked safe" and "distinctive clothes of the 80's." My writing samples, which are all over the map subject-wise, were picking up search traffic. Not terrible--hey, one of those searchers might be looking for someone to write something on those topics--but not likely to be buyers.

Then I started noticing a small trickle from a search term I've actually been targeting. I think I did a little dance in my office. I did a search for that exact term, and saw that I was on page four of the Google SERP's. Okay, so that's hardly gold star rankings. But it's better than not at all, which is what I had been ranking before. Yep, it's possible for your site not to show up in any search engine, anywhere, at all. My first website had no online game.

My boyfriend, who is a brilliant person but not a pro designer, set that first website up. My goal was to simply have something to show clients looking for samples. It was very basic; there were maybe three samples on it, all from my first forays into freelancing, mostly in .pdf format. This summer I decided to see if I was capable of more. Here's what I've done so far to get myself ranked on Page Four of an actual real-live targeted search term.

Redo my website. I taught myself very basic Dreamweaver skills and designed my new website myself. Is it perfect? No. I probably have a long way to go. Is it better than my old site? Absolutely. It's got a lot of content in terms of samples, it's more focused toward web writing (which I've come to concentrate on), and it's a bit snazzier than before. It's also got some basic SEO principles on there: I incorporated bread crumb navigation and I wrote a separate title tag for each page. Look out, Aaron Wall.

Submit to website directories. Directories don't give you traffic, but they can give you PageRank. Some of these directories, like DMOZ, carry a lot of authority on the net. If they link to you using one of your chosen keywords, search engines are more likely to serve you up when someone types in those phrases--or so I understand. I found a list of website directories and submitted my website to all the free ones. I used targeted keywords as anchor text (the words you actually use as a link), and looked for deep as well as home page links whenever I could. To the uninitiated: a "deep" link is a link to a page within a deeper level of your website--my article on the benefits of an autoresponder series, which is a few clicks in, would be an example of a page on a deeper level. A home page link just links to your index page.

Start a blog. Originally I was planning to put this blog on Wordpress and upload it to my own site. But I was all teched out by the time I got to that point. I just wanted to get started writing without facing another steep learning curve, and figuring out how to install Wordpress myself was just too much for me to handle at the time. The website talks about how easy it is to install. They're liars.

Anyway, this blog has brought quite a bit of traffic to my website. It links to it, obviously--but it brings in search traffic, too. I read a cautionary article once that blogs on Blogger addresses aren't indexed by Google because of that "yourblog.blogspot.com" address, but mine comes up in search results.

Write articles for other blogs. I've written some free articles for blogs I like, including few links using targeted keywords. I try to include two or three links: one to the home page of my site, one to a deeper page like my services or samples page, and one to my blog. I'm careful about the words I choose as anchor text.

Write articles for directories. I've been moving forward slowly on my article marketing campaign. I've submitted ten articles to Ezine Articles, each with a resource box with links back to my site. Most of these articles have gotten syndicated. I've submitted an article to IdeaMarketers, too. So far it only has six views and one syndication--but it's only been a week.

That about wraps it up for the effort I've put in to get ranked for this keyword. To be honest, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it this soon--I've only been working on this since August. I know, there are probably plenty of folks out there who are top ranked all over the place in the first three months of their SEO campaign. My thought on that is they may be using some dark-side SEO tactics, because organic search is supposed to take a while. If not, more power to 'em. Organic SEO is a long process, and I've got to fit this in around client work and other commitments. But hey--it does work!