You don’t have to look hard to see the publishing business is changing. Newspapers are cutting jobs left and right as advertising dries up and the economy spins closer to recession. At the same time, publishers are finally sinking more effort into their digital properties, though they still haven’t figured out how to make money.

Freelancers need to change too, if only for the fact that hundreds of freshly out of work newspaper reporters are writing letters of introduction and pitching story ideas to the magazine editors that established freelancers have had all to themselves until now. In many cases, those newspaper reporters already have the skills that freelancers need going forward, skills that will keep them in demand as publishers get their digital groove on. What are those skills?

• Knowing enough HTML to put links in a story
• Creating an online story package
• Using content management software to file stories
• Shooting audio and video
• Producing a podcast
• Running a blog

I’m learning this stuff along with everyone else, so for all our sakes, in the coming weeks I’ll be writing about the skills freelancers should have in the age of digital news, and in some cases, interviewing writers who’re already acquired them to find out how they did it.

Today’s lesson: SEO, or search engine optimization. An entire industry has developed around the science of putting frequently searched words and phrases into the text of blog posts or Websites so they’ll appear high in search-engine rankings and get more traffic as a result.

To understand how freelancers can pick up SEO skills, I turned to two writers turned SEO experts, Marty Weil and Gary Pool, who’ve offered to share how they got into the business.

Marty Weil has been a freelance magazine writer, blogger, owner of a PR consulting and ghostwriting firm, and most recently, SEO writer. The Asheville, North Carolina, resident has been in the writing business long enough to have lived through down times before, so when things started to look bad again, he decided he needed to do something to stand out. That something different was SEO. In his own words, here’s what he did:

“Over the course of several months, I dedicated several hours a day to studying SEO. I studied blogs of leading SEO gurus and read top SEO forums. After months of self-study, I took a SEO/SEM class at A-B Tech in Asheville to gauge how much I’d learned. I was pleased to discover that I had not only grasped the main principles, but was able to instruct the instructor on some of the more cutting-edge aspects.

“If I hadn’t launched a blog several years ago — and put into practice what I was learning — it would have been much more difficult to develop an expertise in SEO. Using SEO principles, I’ve been able to take my blog traffic from a few dozen page views per month to more than 14,000 in January, 2008.”

Gary Pool got into SEO writing a different way. Pool was a Website designer who wanted to understand why sites he built appeared high in Google or Yahoo searches. Researching the reasons led him to the world of SEO, and he’s been there ever since. Pool uses his SEO skills for work with small businesses, churches and other clients of his company, White Rose Productions, in Portland, Oregon.

Pool uses SEO software that automates the work of putting commonly used words and phrases into copy on Websites and blogs. Some of his favorites are Niche Bot, a subscription-based software tool, SEO Book, a regularly updated e-book with a variety of SEO tools, Word Tracker, another SEO tool that offers a free trial version.

But there’s only so much you should do with software. The most well-optimized blog post won’t do you any good if you end up with text that’s incomprehensible, Pool says. Other advice: avoid industry jargon and don’t overlook where words are placed. “I’ve got a client who does catering,” Pool says. “If I was searching, I’d search for ‘catering and Portland.’ But people in Portland don’t search like that. They put ‘Portland’ first and then ‘catering.’ That’s a small difference, but if most people put them in that order, you need to have them in that order in your blog.”

Other advice: don’t let SEO keywords sap all of the life out of your Website or blog copy. “If it’s dry and in-your-face marketing, people will get tired of looking at all the ads,” Pool says.

Advice from Weil: The best time to optimize a blog post, ad copy or other article bound for the Web is when you’re writing it. Make sure the keywords you need to use are in the text. Weil recommends using no more than two keywords per post, and a “keyword density” of no more than 4 uses per 100 words, or 4 percent. And don’t forget to include lots of links. “That pretty much sums up the SEO part. The rest is old-fashioned common sense copywriting,” he says. “Write quality, sticky copy that benefits the reader. And the search engines will love you for it.”

There are plenty of online resources for learning SEO writing, including Websites such as SEO Roundtable, a group-written blog about all things related to SEO, and SearchEngineWatch. SEO Consultants maintains a list of blogs about the SEO business.

Some parts of the country have active SEO organizations whose members meet regularly for workshops and conventions. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you’re just in time to catch SearchFest 2008, sponsored by SEMpdx, the local SEO association. Check out SEO Book’s SEO Conference Calendar for meetings near you.

I recently shared a marketing expert’s advice for freelancer writers and other self-employed creative types to stay happy and solvent during shaky economic times. His suggestions boiled down to a few simple maxims: cultivate existing client relationships, specialize, learn new skills and network.

Reality check time. Do freelancers heed such advice? Or do they use other strategies for beating bad times? To find out, I posted those questions on LinkedIn, the business networking site. What I got back was very concrete and creative directions from writers and other freelance professionals about what they’re doing to cope. Here’s what they said:

Keep regular clients happy – Cultivate a core group of clients and work hard to keep them happy. The best way to do that: deliver above and beyond what’s expected. “Happy clients return no matter what,” says Flip Wiltgren, a freelance writer and game designer in Linkoping, Sweden. Marijke Vroomen-Durning, a Montreal freelancer and author of the HelpMyHurt blog, emails clients every so often with updates on her work and asks outright if they have anything they need done. “Sometimes, your email lands in their inbox at exactly the right time,” she says.

Market yourself as a virtual employee - Down times can be good times for independent contractors because clients can use them without adding to payroll, says AnnaLisa Michalski, a virtual assistant and writing support specialist in Norfolk, Virginia. Susan Emmens, a Richmond, Virginia, freelance marketing strategist, contacts companies looking for full-time employees to offer her services as a contractor. “Some have reasons that make freelancing a bad fit, but many are open to the idea that having a fresh set of eyes who isn’t mired in the company stuff might be just what the doctor ordered,” she says.

Change your thinking about where work comes from - Think outside the box, says Kathee Brewer, a Houston freelance writer. “There are quite a few ‘little’ jobs out there for talented writers who don’t let their egos get in the way,” Brewer says. “It’s hard not to appreciate the benefits provided by small, recurring assignments that, perhaps aren’t career builders, but nonetheless provide a bit of budgetary breathing room while one works on the things that really capture the imagination.”

Vroomen-Durning, the Montreal freelancer, spends time ever day combing freelance job boards, including Craigslist. “I know it has a bad rep, but if you take the time to look, you do find some real gems,” she says. “Two of my best clients have come from there. One in terms of high pay, another in terms of fun and enjoying the work.”

Measure projects by hourly not per word rates – Freelancers sometimes pass up work because the per-word rate is low. But projects should be judged on their merits and not just on per-word rates. Vroomen-Durning takes jobs based on how how well she knows the subject. An $800 project that she can do in 8 hours is a good hourly income. “If I’m offered that same amount for a shorter article but it involves a lot of research and reviewing back and forth, it may take a lot longer than 8 hours so it’s not worth my while,” she says.

Change how you think of yourself - If you want new types of work, create new ways to describe what you do, says Robert Dolezal, a Sacramento, California, publisher, content architect, and content provider. “If you’re usually a copywriter, step up into an editor’s role and re-brand yourself. It’s an excellent way to get new conversations going,” he says.

Call in favors – Use clients or contacts to ask for referrals, advice, and suggestions. “Studies show that more (job) action takes place from casual acquaintances than from those close to you, so getting the word out is important,” Dolezal says. And don’t forget to return the favor.

Go back to old clients – “You’ve already worked for them. That takes away a lot of stress and hard work,” says Terri Maurer, a past president of the American Society of Interior Designers and author of an upcoming book on the interior design business from Wiley & Sons. But don’t call just to ask for work: touch base to see how they’re doing. “The idea is to remind them you’re out there. The odds are you’ll find a few who were just thinking about calling you, or you will have called at just the right time,” she says.

Specialize – If you specialize, dig even deeper into a niche so you become an expert on the subject. Maria Marsala, President of Elevating Your Business, a Seattle consultant that helps small and mid-sized businesses, went from marketing to small business owners to marketing to financial advisers and planners. “It’s working for me,” Marsala says.

Use down time to look for new work – Sue Kristoff, owner of The Kristoff Group LLC, a Boston area engineering and technical writing firm, uses down time to troll online portals for new work. She also publicizes her business by leaving comments on blogs and online forums.

Sell one thing – You might wear a lot of hats, but trying to explain all that to prospective clients is confusing. So sell one thing. For Richard Laurence Baron, who started freelancing after a 30-year career in advertising agencies, that one thing is copyrighting. “Only a portion of my marketing/communications revenue comes from copywriting, but I still SELL that one thing. All the other stuff comes when the relationship and the trust is built,” says the Houston-based freelancer. Read more on his blog, SignalWriter.

Schmooze – Get out of your office and attend a networking breakfast or other real-world function. “Meeting people face to face or (getting) a reference through a contact has yielded me pretty much every major client I’ve got,” says Wiltgren, the Swedish freelancer. Maurer, the interior design author, adds, “Getting to know people before they needed my services allowed us to have some very open conversations about their companies, their needs and how my services might or might not be a fit for them.”

Learn new skills – This is the third big economic downturn that long-time freelancer Marty Weil has weathered. This time, he hopes to differentiate himself from other freelancers by offering search engine optimization (SEO) copywriting in addition to his other writing services. To prepare, he’s taken courses and practiced on his own blogs. Weil is also using his blogs as revenue generators. “My blogs have become successful business units in themselves, and as I’d hoped, have led to some amazing and worthwhile freelance writing opportunities,” he says.

S.W.O.T. – Grant Plowman, owner of Interactive Media Publishing, a Medford, Oregon, e-learning tools company, suggests that freelancers can pinpoint where they are and what they could do better using an assessment technique called SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The steps: analyze your strengths, honestly evaluate weaknesses, examine opportunities with present or potential clients, look at threats to existing client relationships and whether the services you provide represent a value that exceeds their cost.

You can read the complete text of answers freelancers gave on this topic on LinkedIn’s Answer section here.