SEO = Findability

I want to be found!

When I first started blogging about three years ago, it was more like a little secret I had with myself. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it and I actually worried that someone I knew might somehow find out. I struggled with issues of ego and hid behind self incrimination:

Why am I doing this?

Who’s to say my words matter?

I’m nobody and only nobody cares.

My thoughts don’t matter, my opinions are irrelevant, and my experiences aren’t “cool” enough.

You FOOL!

But I did it anyway.

Then I let the secret out. First I told a few friends, then some people in my family. Before long, I was talking about it openly. After a year or so, I posted a few links to my blog on facebook. A few people were reading it, but most were not. By then, I didn’t care anymore – I didn’t care who read it and I didn’t care that most of the people who knew me and knew I was doing it didn’t read it. I just cared about fostering my own passion to write. Though not highly recognized and certainly not very well read, I knew my blog was public and therefore, it kept me aiming for quality work. It also kept me committed to my daily writing practice. That first blog was, and still is, purely personal.

The more I wrote and posted on my blog, the more I learned about blogging in general. As a result, themes emerged and I became anchored on a few specific areas of focus. Eventually I launched the Nitty Gritty of Writing blog to practice blogging professionally.

Now I am finally ready to be found!

SEO articles posted to article directories are my latest focus because the SEO keywords in those articles will bring more visitors to my blog. I want the traffic for three reasons:  

1. When people leave comments it helps me to find them and I want to find others so I can learn from them and build community; 
2. I do believe I have significant things to share and I want to help others to learn; and
3. I want to be found by people who can lead me to the next level in my work.

Yes, SEO = findability 

and I want to be found. 

Don’t you?  

Blogging Intensive

I just started teaching an intensive blogging workshop. We met on Friday for 3 hours at Panera and began with brainstorming and planning, talked about promotion, and ended with everyone setting up their own blog. It was so exciting to see participants “get it” and to share in the joy and excitement as they created their visions. I’m going to eventually turn our work into worksheets and information to post here along with a comprehensive ebook about blogging.

Today we’ll have our next session and work more on blog designing including layout, widgets, etc., and what you can do with a blog. We will also learn about SEO writing. We’ll follow up at our third session with an emphasis on article writing.

I’ve learned a lot in the last 2 years of online writing, but I have so much more I want and need to learn. I’m at a point now that I need human interaction and feedback, so this workshop is aimed at sharing what I know and asking for help with what I hope to learn.

We are off to a great start: four committed and enthusiastic participants, each with a specific direction, all with similar dreams. The fourth session will be focused on tying up loose ends, follow-up and review. At that time we will also deal with questions regarding what we still want and need to learn. It is my hope that we will continue to meet regularly to continue our learning and to share with each other to foster the learning.

I would really like for us to each take responsibility for several of the questions generated by our meetings and research on our own with the promise to come back to the group to teach what we have learned.

Article Writing

Article writing is one of the most “secure” jobs in the writing field. Absolutely everybody online needs articles. “Article marketing” is one of the biggest buzz words in the online industry.

Think about any Google search you have ever done – if you are looking for information, you find articles. Nearly all those articles include a link to some sort of website. This is how online business people promote their bubusinesses and attract new customers. All these businesses need writers for all these articles.

As a writer, you can do the same thing. Simply post articles in article directories that yu have written and include a short bio box at the end. People will find you.

Article writing is a numbers game: the more you write, the bigger your reprotoire and the more chances you have of being found. So write several articles about the same broad topic so that you have many avenues to one subject. This increases your exposure and over time, establishes you as an expert in the field.

Article writing is also a words game. SEO stands for Search Engine Optomized and is how the search engines rank information on the web. Use SEO keywords in your title and again throughout your article with more concentration on them in your introductory paragraph. This will push your article higher on the list of hits when people search for information related to your article.

Your articles stay online forever, so it’s not like you get one big bang for your buck and then its gone. Online business people know this, so they are constantly adding articles to their business. If you establish yourself as an article writer, you will always have a job!

Writing Articles for Search Engine Optimization

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimized. An SEO article is one that contains keywords that get picked up by the search engines and determines where it falls in the line of thousands of articles about the same topic. How those specific keywords are determined is a whole other topic and will be addressed in a separate article. For the purpose of this article, it is sufficient to know that the keywords are very specific and very important. There is no flexibility or creativity in the use of the SEO keywords.

An SEO article will be based on 2 – 3 predetermined keywords. Let’s say for example, that you are working with the following keywords: acai berry health benefits / health benefits of acai berry / health benefits of acai berries. The SEO article needs to contain at least one of these keywords in the title. Then in the first paragraph, all the keywords need to appear at least once. More than that is even better. The keywords need to continue to appear throughout the article including the conclusion. The more times the keywords (all of them appear) in the article, the higher chance the article has of showing up at the top of the list of search results produced by the search engine.

You completely blow the strategy if you try to get creative with the keywords. For example, if you exchange the words “acai berries” with “little black tropical berries” it doesn’t count. Words such as “acai fruit”, “healthy berries”, “health boost of acai berries”, etc. are some variation of the predetermined SEO keywords and will not get your article to the top of the list. This doesn’t mean you can’t use these variations; it just means that they don’t count in terms of your purpose.

The challenge is to create an interesting article that doesn’t sound elemental to the reader. When you use the same words over and over, it is difficult not to sound redundant. This challenge is where you get to exercise your creativity.

I tend to get bored writing SEO articles, so I have a formula and I play it like a game. I aim to use each keyword a minimum of five times in the article. Each one has to be used at least once (preferably twice) in the title and the first two sentences. Then I hear the keywords like a mantra in my head as I’m writing. Sometimes they fit, and sometimes I choose one of the variations. In the end, I have an interesting, informative article that also fits the requirements.

Write SEO articles quickly, but carefully. Only count your keywords at the end. As you are writing, imagine the keywords as helium-filled balloons that will send your article above all the rest – and remember that there are tens of thousands of articles starting out on the ground just like yours.

It’s like a race. Aim to excel.