What Freelance Writers Should Know about SEO

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.