We want to help you become familiar with writing for the Internet. Especially if you are serious about establishing a freelance writing career.

There probably is no better opportunity for freelance writers in the world than the Internet. In fact there are those who suggest that e-newspapers and e-zines will someday, perhaps very soon, replace printed materials.

That may be so, but the Internet still has a long way to go before it reaches what can truly be called a professional calibre of writing.

The more writers are interested in truly bringing value to the information that can be found on the Internet the better. That means that my focus is on those writing for the Internet with commitment and skill. I want to make sure they know how to apply it.

Right now a quick look around the Internet will demonstrate that there are a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of snake oil salesmen. In fact I think the Internet is the true Final Frontier; people can create a whole new reputation and then use that to manipulate others to their advantage in all areas, and that includes writing.

Many sites out there claim the ability to help you start a freelance writing career, but how many actually succeed? Most of the sites I have been to are really no more than arenas for aspiring writers to posture and judge; as far as practical information that leads to cash in your hand, they are pretty much useless.

With that in mind, I have made a list of some things to look for when it comes to a site that claims to help one write for the Internet.

1. Are there facts and figures?
   The problem with the Internet is that anyone can claim to be someone they are not, and it can be pretty hard to tell if a site’s claims are legitimate or not.
   One thing I look for in a site that claims to have first-hand knowledge about making a living writing are facts and figures. What kind of money does the developer make a month? Where does he or she find jobs? Writers are an elusive bunch, and that isn’t just online; there are plenty of books out there that claim to be great writing resources, but just don’t offer any solid information.
2. Are there obvious mistakes?
   One website I really enjoy is www.stevepavlina.com. He is straightforward and I have referred people to him a couple of times on this website.
   I do take what he says with a grain of salt though, and here’s why: in an article on blogging for money, he claims to make $1000 a day off of his website. He then goes on to say that he only ever does the website as a part time job; in other words, he still retains a job outside of the Internet. Now it could be that Steve loves his land job so much that he does it for the fun, but I do tend to question anyone who makes $30,000 a month but still works another job. Crazy or embellishing, take your pick.
3. Grammar and spelling.
   Every writer knows that there are going to be some mistakes when it comes to grammar and spelling in any piece, no matter how hard you check. All of us have tunnel vision when it comes to our own work, so a few mistakes here and there shouldn’t turn you off totally when it comes to a site.
   If there are constant mistakes throughout all the pages on the site, though, ones that go way beyond simple typos, the odds are pretty good that the site is not a very good resource when it comes to writing for the Internet.

Those are just a few of the things I recommend looking at when you find a potential resource about writing for the Internet. Even on sites where you find some of the flaws I listed above, you will probably be able to glean some useful bits of information. Just make sure to be careful about taking everything they say as Gospel truth!

“Learn to write” might seem like kind of a superfluous section. After all, if you want to start a freelance writing career, then obviously you already know at least a bit about how to write. Still, all of us can use tips that can help us to learn to write in order to further our careers that much more.

Different writing styles are required for different writing markets, something that making a living writing for the Internet has demonstrated very clearly to me.

Writing for the Internet is not like writing for newspapers or magazines, and it is certainly not like the creative writing that most of us, as writers, hope that we will one day be able to earn money doing.

Tricks and Tips

There are different tricks and tips that need to be remembered whenever you attempt to get on your keyboard and create content that will be of interest to web surfers and therefore web developers, and the whole process can get even more involved when you throw in different web building strategies such as search engine optimization.

There are also the pitfalls such as writer’s block. I get stuck with it and appreciate any input on how you overcome writers block.

Helpful Information

In this section, we will look at different places where you can find helpful information when it comes to creating content that does well on the Internet. I am hoping that this site will become your main reference point. I have learned a lot about my own Internet writing style through the example of other writers, and I think that the broader your knowledge base and sources on this subject are, the better.

Online Creative Writing Courses

I think we will also use this section to dig up information about online creative writing courses. I have mentioned in other articles that a lot of writers seem to think that education in writing is somehow counter productive, but I strongly disagree.

There is a lot to be said for a continued desire to learn to write in a more effective manner, and there are plenty of materials out there to help you do so. In fact there are probably more online creative writing courses out there than there are practical web related ones, which is absolutely acceptable to me because I am more interested in the practical side of things.

Synthesis Through Ongoing Learning

Of course you might be gifted enough to create a synthesis between your creative writing abilities and the things you learn about writing for the Internet. In that case, you stand to gain an awful lot as long as you know where to look for opportunities and how to go about landing clients!

At the very foundation of an Internet writing business lies an understanding of keyword writing. It is one of the very first terms that I ever came across in relation to writing for the Internet; in fact I heard the word keyword long before I had heard of SEO.

Of course, just because I heard something doesn’t mean that I understood it. I did understand that it was important and that obviously these were words that were to be used in the articles I was to write, but beyond that I didn’t really have a clue as to what keyword writing was. Thanks to a couple years in the business and with the help of resource materials such as my trusty SEO for Dummies book and websites such as www.selfseo.com, I have come a long way in my understanding of keyword writing and how to go about using it effectively. While those references I mentioned will prove helpful, like many of the resources I have consulted while growing my business I found them lacking in some areas, areas that I ended up filling in myself.

Besides the obvious, what are keywords?

If you have ever gone to a search engine to look for information, you will have typed a phrase or a keyword into the query box and then received a couple thousand pages which contain those keywords. Those results are the pages that are indexed by the search engines as being relevant to the keyword or phrase. They are ranked according to secret algorithms that try to show the most relevant and useful sites first.

Here’s a pretty relevant example. Let’s say you want to make money writing online, or you are interested in starting a freelance writing career. Well, you will probably type those exact phrases into the query section of a search engine (or just click the links), and hopefully this site will appear somewhere within the top results. The reason is, my partner Alexander Kohl has carefully researched several dozen keywords that people use most often when it comes to freelance writing, and has told me I have to use them if we want to get visitors.

In fact, if you look closely at the articles on this site, you will probably notice an awful lot of keyword writing taking place. Placing the right key words or phrases within pages is very important for attracting traffic.

The trick with keywords

One of the temptations with keywords is to overuse them within an article in order to get a high ranking. This trick has been tried before, and in various forms, and it appears as though search engines have caught on. Keyword stuffing is considered black hat SEO technique, and placing keywords all over a site may even result that site being banned from the search engine index.

Of course, every time word of something like that gets out, there tends to be an overreaction. When I first started writing for a living on the Internet, many clients were calling for keyword densities of 15-20%. In other words, for every 100 words I used in a piece, the key phrase had to be used between 15 and 20 times. Obviously, this made for some ridiculously written pieces, and I hated writing them. Thankfully, when Google and the other search engines changed their algorithms, they had obviously caught on. While this kind of “stuffing” wasn’t considered to be as bad as other forms, it was bad enough to get sites ranked lower after a query was performed.

The upshot of this is that keyword writing is now much less focused on the keyword and more on the end user, the human web surfer. Web site developers are looking for writers who can fit keywords naturally into an article, press release, and so on without making it look forced, and with a reasonable density (2-5%). Again, this reinforces my golden rule of SEO and writing for the Internet: don’t write for the engines, write for people!

Keyword writing today

If you want to know the honest truth, I hate keyword writing. I don’t like having to fit a word into any article at all, particularly when I feel as though the word itself shouldn’t matter, it’s the idea of the piece that counts. If you need to use the word a certain amount of times, then you should be able to do so, and if you don’t, then you shouldn’t force it.

Still, a writing career on the Internet means that you have to be able to walk that fine line between human consumption and what the spiders can read and understand. Keyword writing will probably always be around in one form or another, and I do feel glad that it has at least progressed beyond the crazy stuffing frenzies of two years ago. Until search engines begin using human editors again (which Yahoo! still does, incidentally) it’s likely that Internet writers will have to perform at least minor word gymnastics from time to time in order to make sure clients remain satisfied.

A big part of my success as a freelance writer can be attributed to the concept of SEO copy writing. In this article, we are going to take a look at what SEO copy writing is and how it has changed over the years. We are also going to take a look into our crystal ball to see what the future of SEO is, based of course on fairly educated guesses.

What is SEO copy writing?

When you are looking for information on the Internet, where’s the first place you go? It’s pretty likely that you go to one of the big search engines (Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, AskJeeves.com, and so on) and type in your query, then check out the results until you find something useful. Statistics say that at least 51% of new visitors to Internet sites find their way to the site in this way.

In fact, you probably found your way to this site that way, if Alex and I are doing our jobs properly! That job, as far as marketing goes, is making sure that the web pages we have on the site rank, and rank well, on the search engines. The process is called Search Engine Optimization, and involves a lot of processes which for me are very boring, save one, SEO copy writing.

SEO copy writing is an important concept for anyone who wants to make a living writing on the Internet. You might never set a page or site up yourself, but some basic knowledge in the area will help you to sell yourself when you are bidding on a job or proposing that a potential new client should use your services.

When it comes to web sites, content is king. Search engines crawl the Internet with “spiders” on a regular basis, and these spiders (or “bots”) index pages according to their content. When a person types in a search query (such as “How can I make money writing”, for example) pages are ranked according to the relevance of the content the spiders found. If a site has a lot of content in the form of text.

SEO copy writing, then and now

No one can really claim a full knowledge as to how search engine optimization really works. This is because the search engine companies keep their formulae for ranking pretty close to their chests; they don’t want people abusing the system. Most of the techniques you will see as far as SEO practices are arrived at through experimentation, albeit a lot of experimentation that seems to work all the time.

What we do know is that sites with good content tend to rank fairly high for queries, and that content comes about through good SEO copy writing. This process has come a long way since search engines started up. Good rankings used to be dependent on links, until that system was abused. Then it became about keywords, another method which was abused (see our article on keyword writing, which details that a little bit more). Today, the search engine algorithms have been adapted to exclude a lot of the useless content that used to be found in a search.

What this means for SEO copy writing

You don’t have to take my word for all this, there is another great articles on search engine copywriting. What these articles and everything else in the evolution of SEO and SEO writing points to is that search engines are becoming more and more concerned with meeting the needs of the people that use them; they want to provide highly relevant, useful information every time someone makes a query.

I, for one, am delighted with this direction, and if you are a good writer you will be too. What it means is that poor writers, those who can’t seem to string a sentence together or form an argument in logical sequence, won’t be a huge worry as far as competition anymore. Why? Because even on the Internet, people do expect a certain quality in the pieces they read. They don’t want a bunch of information that is difficult to read or downright useless, they want meaty articles that they can rely on and sink their teeth into (this doesn’t mean that you will be allowed to bring all your skills to bear because the average Internet reader will still prefer an article written at the grade 7 level). Writers who take pride in their work will once again be able to command the prices that they deserve.

The golden rule of SEO copy writing

Because of the nature of the search engine business, I have long maintained that the golden rule when it comes to writing for search engine optimization purposes, the key is not to follow the rules that seem to work for the engines, but to follow rules that you KNOW work for human readers. After all, humans are who the search engines have been set up for, not the spiders and the bots. If you keep that in mind when you are looking for, and once you land, SEO copy writing jobs, your pieces will do fine and your customers will be happy.