SEO writing is a huge part of my freelancing business. I do it a lot and it isn’t really that hard either. For some reasons however most people fear writing for SEO because they have no clue on how to proceed. Writing for SEO is the next installment in my Freelance Writing Guide For New Freelancers to help you understand how easy it really is.

WordPress blogs have a very good advantage over traditional websites. They are ideal to rank well in search engines and it is relatively easy to style them for perfect on site SEO. But more importantly, if our blog posts aren’t written in an easy to understand language containing the necessary keywords, they will never rank well in Google, especially in a competitive market.

Google is the main search engine used by most Internet marketers all around the world and this post is written with Google in mind. Frankly, if you rank well in Google, you will make money. It’s a simple and complicated as that.

Over the years I have managed many times to snatch a top position in Google within days (sometimes hours) of writing a blog post. The trouble is, that unless our blog has many incoming links and is out of the sandbox (a whole topic for another post), the ranking will only stay there for a couple of days.

But this isn’t so much a problem because with consistent writing and getting more incoming links to our blogs, these SEO written posts will climb Google once again and stay there mostly indefinitely.

How to SEO your blog posts

It all starts with the blog title. The blog title needs to contain the main keyword you are targeting. Having the keyword in our post title goes a long way for SEO, given that the blog is set to the right permalinks. It is even better if your targeted keyword is contained within the actual domain name.

Now here is a secret many don’t know. To make your blog post more “people friendly” you can write a post with the keyword in it, but use the actual keyword as it should be in the post slug. You will find the post slug in the right hand side column in your WordPress editor. The post slug is what makes up the end part of the URL which preferably should be each of these keyword in each new post. If you don’t use the slug, then WordPress will pull the info from your blog title instead and this will diffuse your SEO.

First Paragraph: when writing your blog post you will need to write your main keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph. Since the search engine bots spider web pages from the top left to bottom right, it makes sense to have your main keyword right at the beginning. The first paragraph should contains around 4-5 sentences and finish with the keyword in the last sentence again. This is the excerpt that is being shown on Google searches and if done correctly the keyword will show both in the title, twice in the paragraph and preferably in the URL.

Blog Post Main Body: the body again needs to have the keyword your target at least a couple of times more. Depending on the length of the article this varies but aiming at around 3% is a safe bet. You don’t want to overdo this otherwise it can have the opposite effect. Additionally you can also use bold text or italic text to highlight certain keywords.
You should also aim to supplement your targeted keyword with at least one other related keyword. More are better. Perhaps a shorter version of it. The more related keywords you use, the better it is for your search engine rankings. Also, most keyword related posts or articles range from 300 - 500 words.

Subheadings: To further your cause for a good strong SEO post or article, use subheadings with the keyword. This is done by using the h3 tags. This works well for lists too.

Last Paragraph: the last paragraph should be styled like the first one in terms of the keyword. Here it is most important to have your keyword in the last sentence as this is also often pulled from bots.

Tagging: tagging is very important in blogging as every tag we create will generate one incoming link from social bookmarking sites such as Technorati and Delicious. However, we should only use 10 tags at the most for every blog post we write and rephrase the keyword, use the blog main keyword in each post as a tag as well and use related keywords as tags.

If for example your post is about electrical guitars, then there is no point in using classical guitars as a tag for this particular post.

Interlinking: as you probably would have seen, I try to interlink all my blog posts and pages. Normally I use the main keyword to link back to the home page which is good for Page Rank debt when that kicks in.

That’s basically it for SEO in regards to writing blog posts. The same principle applies in writing keyword targeted articles that are being submitted to article data bases.

It is most important that these posts are readable to the human eye and actually make sense. With a bit of practice you’ll have this down pat in no time.

I can basically take any topic now and write a highly effective SEO post or article. If you wonder whether I do this here on Freelance Writing, no most often I don’t. I use this SEO technique mostly for niche marketing clients and for my own niche sites.

Naturally, this is only part of optimizing a blog to rank high in Google and other factors like previously mentioned link building, on page SEO and more factor into this whole equation. I can tell you this though. If you master SEO writing you can easily snatch up some work as a freelance writer on many of the job sites.

Monika

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS Feed. Thanks for visiting! And please feel free to comment. Top commenter's will go into my weekly Link Love Pot