How a Freelance Web Content Writer Can Help Optimize Your Web Site

A lot of clients come to me knowing they want their sites written for search engine optimization (SEO), but they're not entirely sure what that means. (There's nothing wrong with that; my clients are busy professionals whose expertise usually lies elsewhere.) In short, search engine optimization means writing your site -- both the content and the code -- in ways that increase the chances that it'll come up high in the results when someone searches for a business like yours. The Web design and legal marketing companies I work with generally handle the code side of things and help clients come up with "keywords" (they're actually phrases most of the time) that someone searching the Web might use to find them.

My job is to write the content. You may have seen the phrase "content is king" when reading about SEO. Content is very important for three reasons:

• Search engines actually take content into account when ranking your site. (More about how this works in the next section.)
• Once you have the user's eyeballs on the page, well-written, Web-friendly and useful content keeps them there.
• This, in turn, helps increase your page's rankings, because rankings are based in part on popularity -- how often the site comes up, how long users stay, how many links there are to other popular or authoritative sites.

Updating your content frequently is also important, which is why so many of my clients are starting blogs. Of course, there are other ways to do this -- updating the static content regularly or adding press releases, newsletters and other time-sensitive material. I do all of this, and I do it with an eye to SEO by integrating keywords into the text in a natural way. While I'm there, I try to make the text user-friendly by writing in a way that I think is easy for Web users to read; putting the right keywords in the right places; copy editing (making sure all of the language mechanics are in place and fixing typos); and removing any "legalese" or difficult language that might scare clients off.

How Content Can Increase Search Engine Ranking

Search engine companies like Google have computer programs (sometimes called "crawlers" or "spiders") that are constantly looking through the Web to catalogue its content. They put the information they get into really, really big databases. When you search for something using a search engine, it sifts through that database to bring you the results you're looking for (hopefully). How exactly this happens is a guarded trade secret and differs slightly between search engine companies.

However, the databases are organized in part by some of the features the program "thought" were important about your site. Many of those have to do with the written content of page, and they include:

• What keywords you're using. The web crawlers find content to treat like keywords even when it's not intended to be.
• How often the keywords are repeated. Warning: It's possible to take this too far! You will be punished by both search engines and readers if you put up a page of nothing but keywords.
• Where they're placed. Some content is more equal than others.
• How well your keywords and HTML tags seem to match your content.
• Who you're linking to and how you do it. More relevant to your business is better, and the "anchor text" that forms the visible part of your link is better when it's something more relevant than "click here."
• Who's linking to you. You don't have complete control over this, of course, but you can do things to make this easier for other sites.

There are also some things to do with the coding of the site (the part that users don't see). I generally tell clients to talk to their search engine marketing/web design companies about this, because they're the experts. It's my job to support them with content that's search-engine optimized, reader-friendly and informative. As you may be able to see, I am a fan of what's called "organic SEO," which essentially means that I am not willing to sacrifice content in order to include as many keywords as possible. I have worked and will work for clients who feel differently -- although I still do my best to keep things readable, because language is important to me.

If you want more information -- or if that didn't quite make sense to you -- you might find this article from Forbes Magazine helpful: "How to Get Found Online," by Naomi Grossman, Feb.13, 2009. Grossman interviews SEO Consultant Rebecca Lieb on how SEO can level the playing field for small and midsize businesses with a Web site.