SEO Mini-Tutorial For Writers: Part 1

Written By: Trina Moitra
If you earn your living as a pen for hire, it is quite likely that you have come across the cryptic acronym SEO. It stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a tool with the help of which virtual businesses try and outdo each other in the race to feature at the top of a Search Engine Results Page or SERP as those in the know like to call it.

WHY IS SEO A BIG DEAL?


SEO is NOT a big deal if you consider it on its own. But viewed holistically with the critical factor of bringing in traffic to a website, its stature grows considerably. It is said that 90% of people in the US research a product online using Google, Yahoo! or Bing and then based on information gathered or reviews by bona-fide users make a decision. So right off the bat, business owners can step in and start “influencing” the buying process with an online identity that is easily accessible. This wasn’t so even a decade ago. No wonder that the net spending of the middle class has skyrocketed by close to 60% over the past 7 years. And guess which search results get the maximum number of clicks? If you said “The ones that feature in the top 10 spots of a page” then give yourself a pat on the back. You are absolutely right. SEO or the process of optimization is ensuring that certain web pages rank as high up as possible for certain “search phrases”. Sounds pretty complicated! But it isn’t. Hang on.
THE BASICS OF SEO AND SEO COPY:
The power of SEO comes from the fact that it can work its magic with the help of the web copy. You can literally hide “search phrases” or “keywords” as is the correct terminology, in the text that you have on your website and Google will applaud your effort by helping your page inch up the rankings ladder every time someone types in the particular keyword.
So imagine this scenario, you want to buy plus sized Yoga pants and you launch trusty Google to do a bit of ferreting for you. You will see something like this as the result. 

The results boxed in red are the paid options from Google Adwords (something you don’t need to bother about right now) and the result boxed in green is the top organic result for our search term “Plus sized Yoga pants”. If you click on the link featured in the green box, you end up on a featured products page with a plethora of items related to “Yoga and meditation”. So it goes without saying that Google visited the page and found a feast of the keywords “Yoga”, “Yoga Pants” and “Plus sized pants” and boom- top ranking in the search engine for “Plus sized Yoga pants”.
This is an overly simplistic explanation. There is a lot more to the art of SEO but I plan on making this a mini series of say 3 articles and so the introduction is short and sweet. SEO has a lot of nitty gritties to it and there is a fair bit of technicality to the perfect search engine optimization. But not if it is broken down into the basic components, which is just what I will do for you!
I hope this served to allay the fears of SEO neophytes because according to Brian Tracy “All skills are learnable”. SEO is no exception! See you in 7 days.
Trina Moitra is the official Elance Mobilizer for Kolkata and a certified SEO expert. You can join her group of mentored Elancers by going to www.elance.com/p/crp/kolkata/trina and earn a very rewarding living from home.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for this Trina. As a budding freelance content writer, I appreciated the explanation since it was spot on.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice build-up post, but the search result you mentioned as Organic is actually a Paid Search Result. Organic results start a little more deeper than that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Actually no...Google has started a new facilitation by marking the paid results and these results are now tagged Ad.

    ReplyDelete

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