Apr 21 2010

Search Engine Optimization – A Writer’s Cyber Treasure Trove

This is a guest by Typhoon a.k.a Sushant Risodkar from SmartBloggerz.

Getting published is one of the most difficult challenges a writer faces when pursuing his calling, his profession. Writers often have other sources of income because depending solely on their chosen career might end them up penniless, no matter how good they are.

Fortunately for the multitudes of writers and writers-to-be out there, the World Wide Web has brought to light a few options they can take that lead to both growth as a writer and income as a worker. One of these options is called Search Engine Optimization or simply SEO.

SEO refers to how web content is optimized such that the website that harbors the optimized content gets higher rankings from search engines. For websites and online businesses, SEO means getting better notice and getting more web traffic or visitors to their site, which in turn leads to greater chances of making a sale or generating profit.

For writers, SEO is a good freelance, part or full time internet writing opportunity that has the potential to be their sole income generating activity, leaving them free to pursue other things. Optimized articles are written so that they contain a keyword or set of keywords a certain number of times depending on the word count of the article. The keywords here are the same words a search engine user would type in and use to look for what it is they’re after in the internet.

SEO has been around since the boom of search engine marketing, and therefore countermeasures against abusing it have been developed by search engines. High keyword density—or having too many of the particular keyword—can sometimes have the opposite effect for a website. Through the years SEO has been so thoroughly used by even ‘junk’ sites that they could get higher rankings, thus this countermeasure against keyword stuffing—to be sure the sites being returned or listed by the search engine are quality sites that actually have relevance to the engine user’s search.

To make up for this, Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI has been developed. It sounds pretty technical but what it just means is that basic SEO is still used wherein the keyword appears a certain number of times, but instead of using it too many times, its synonyms or other words that have the same meaning or connotation would take its place. So an article having “cats” as a keyword would show “cats” say three times for the whole 500 word article, but would also use words such as ‘felines’ or ‘pets.’

Now, knowing all this, who would be best suited to skillfully embed these keywords into an article all the while maintaining its quality, and keeping it informative and entertaining? Writers, of course—or at least people who have decent writing skills and good researching capabilities.

What’s great about SEO and LSI is that you don’t have to have your own site to apply it on, there are many sites that hire SEO writers to write articles for distribution to all sorts of sites. In a nutshell, a writer never goes without work (since there is no lack of demand for information in the internet), and has easy access to the ‘workplace’ (all that’s needed is a basic desktop or laptop and internet connection), and everything else is history.

About Author:

Sushant Risodkar is a 16 yrs. old Indian Blogger who loves to blog in his favorite niches like blogging tips , ways to make money online and seo. You can check out his blog at – SmartBloggerz.com . You can follow him at twitter @smartbloggerz

10 Responses to “Search Engine Optimization – A Writer’s Cyber Treasure Trove”

  1. Cass Heaphy says:

    Hi, just a quick point on LSI – as far as I know it can never truly be used as LSI it does not scale well and is too unwieldly for a document set as large as the web. The search engine do indeed use “semantic” relationships in the relevance algorithms but they are simpler and more scalable than the LSI model.

  2. Mike says:

    I think lot have been said in LSI, I am agree that is good only in theory and in practical when you do SEO, lot of basic things are done

  3. Mike says:

    I think lot have been said in LSI, I am agree that is good only in theory and in practical when you do SEO, lot of basic things are done in SEO when we have client project

  4. Chef Lee says:

    The more I read on SEO the more I know I don’t know and I don’t understand. I haven’t finished understanding how to SEO my website and now I’m learning I must also SEO my You tube and WordPress blog. What’s next? SEO our Flickr?

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  5. Savita Bisht says:

    Good blog and learnt much more from your blog….

  6. Sarita Rawat says:

    Interesting blog. Keep it up. Thanks for sharing…………….

  7. Austin nursery says:

    This is a really good post, do you really think it is possible to make a full time living doing this. Or maybe I’ve spent too much time on O-Desk…

  8. Tim says:

    Good thing that i’ve read this post. Search engines like google are frequently updating its systems to avoid spamming on the engines. SEO, I may say, one aspect that affect that. Good thing that there is this LSI. Need further knowledge on this area.

    Thank!

  9. kryztoff says:

    Thank you for sharing your thoughts. You raised good points here. Keep on sharing your knowledge.

  10. Jason says:

    I never focus on writing for LSI, I just know by writing naturally that you are doing that. But this is good info on what it’s about.