One of the quirks about writing for the web instead of print, is the way you have to choose your wording. The most important aspect of your writing work is to make sure your articles are found and read (whether you work for yourself, or are writing for others). And so you need to always keep your thoughts on search engines when you write. Your work isn’t going to do anyone any good if no one can find it. Even when writing for a well-known content network. The trick is to optimize for good keywords.

Search engines rank pages based on a lot of things (a LOT), but the one that you have the best control over is how “keyword dense” your work is. Lots of keywords means (more or less) that a search engine will rank you higher for those search terms than a page that uses them sparingly.
So if you are writing an article on finding a good hotel in your city, but you use the term hotel only once, preferring to mix it up with other words like accommodations, motel, room, inn or hostel, you are NOT doing a good job with your keywords. Without sounding like a vocabulary-less twit, it’s best to use the right words repeatedly, so that the search engines will rank you better for anyone looking for “hotel”.

Make sense? Hope so. Writing for search engines is an art unto itself and can take a while to understand all the details. Keyword density (the proper term for what I’m talking about here) is only one aspect of good SEO. That stands for Search Engine Optimization. Watch for more articles in the future…

Try some of these online tools to measure your keyword density. For most of these, you just put in the URL of your page or article and the tool will spit out the most frequently used words. In some cases, you can provide the keywords you want to use and it will measure the density for you.

• Keyword Density Analyzer from KeywordDensity.com
• Keyword Density Analyzer Tool from SEO Book
• Keyword Density Checker from iWebtools

Remember, it’s not ONLY about the number of times you use a given keyword, but also the total number of words on your page. You can dilute your density with other unnecessary terms or text.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 9:22 am and is filed under Writing Tips, Online Writing 101, Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.