ClearView Writing

On page SEO is an art form that is greatly misunderstood and rarely practiced correctly by many freelance writers. As a freelance writer the majority of jobs you will end up taking will involve sales text and search engine optimization. These jobs will hardly ever throw you into the webpage gubbins of Meta Tags and SEO website coding.

Your job when writing SEO optimized content is the same old two-fold, you have to give your customer what they want and what they need.

Take for instance a site for printers, the customer wants you to write sales text for a new line of Laser Printers. This should sell the product to anyone who views the page. To do this you must suggest the brand repeatedly, promote the product line and entice the customer to purchase the product. In generic terms they may also state that the page should be SEO optimised.

A good customer will provide you with keywords, their preferred density and density placement on page.

Unfortunately not all customers are so well prepared, and expect you to figure this out by yourself, in some cases even wanting you to choose the target keywords.

Now this in itself is bad practice, the customer should tell you what they want you to write, it is not your job to figure out what would bring in the greatest amount of traffic and revenue. After all if you knew this straight off you would be doing it for yourself.

On the other hand though it is good practice for you as a freelance writer to improvise, to complete a job to satisfaction and earn your reputation by working with even the most awkward of clients. While it may not be your role to work on how you will complete the SEO on page it does give you that certain air of professionalism that helps you stand out against one of the worlds most competitive markets.

But first things first, on page optimization for a freelance writer is quite simply the creation of copy (text) that will push itself onto search engines by focusing on certain key words and certain layouts, along with a few other tips and tricks.

On Page Keyword Optimization

The focus on certain keywords is a fine art. To start with too little or too much repetition of the Keyword and its keyword relations is massively important. The ability of your text to attract visitors from search engines could rise or diminish based on this factor alone.

A good layout for keywords is, from my experience,

Header - Main Keyword Phrase

First Paragraph - Main Keyword Phrase, A Secondary Keyword Phrase, Related Phrase

Second Paragraph - Secondary Keyword Phrase, Several Related Phrases & Words from Main Keyword Phrase.

Rest of Text - Main Keyword Phrase should appear in around 1-2% of the text, Secondary keyword phrase about 2-4% and related phrases spread liberally. Parts of the keywords phrase should also be used to help promote the main keyword phrase itself.

Of course this layout for SEO optimization is my own personal view of the best keyword density and keyword layout. Others may find more effective patterns, and I would not be surprised. Keyword optimization is all about making the keywords fit in naturally. You should optimize your keyword densities only to a level where it does not effect the quality and readability of your work.

On Page Formatting Optimization

When you are writing your text on occasions your customer will ask for you to format certain words to help optimize the text for search engines. optimizing your page by formatting the text is relatively simple, though should be used selectively.

If your customer decides that they want you to format teh text for on page search engine optimisation then you have three basic tools to use, namely Header tags, Bold and Italics.  Each of these can be used alone or in combination to enhance the importance of specific words in your text.

Headers, created using the H1, H2 etc tags are especially useful for titles, words given a heading tag are given a much higher level of priority from search engines.  Use these sparingly but with your keywords to hugely increase the effectiveness of your websites.

Using bold and italic text to increase your on page optimisation is again a great technique, remember to use these seo formatting techniques with care though, too much and your site may end up being flagged as spam.  bold or italics should rarely cover more than a sentence and should not appear in any more than 1/3 of your total number of paragraphs.

Using these formatting SEO techniques wisely will lend a new lease of life to your copy that could greatly increase the amount of organic traffic pulled through your text.

Spelling and Grammar for SEO

This should be something you focus on in your writing on anyway, but proper use of spelling and grammar is imperative to good SEO.  Google, the worlds most used search engine has unique techniques to check through sites for valuable, correct and useful information.  To reach this end your search rankings are greatly affected by your spelling and grammar.  A poorly created piece of text is less likely to be of use, less likely to be accurate and much less likely to be what the browser is searching for!

For this reason spell checking and proof reading is essential to the text you write, whether it be for your own websites or your freelance career.