Keyword Writing
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.
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