How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Placement

Optimizing your website content so it is found easily by Google, Yahoo and MSN doesn't have to cost you anything. In Part 1, I listed some free tools to do keyword research. Now I'm going to show you how to make those keywords work for you. Search engines search text and rely on metatags to come up with the titles and descriptions they list in their search results. Metatags can be seen when you select 'View, Source' in your browser menu. They are found in the head section of the page.

What are the most important metatags?

The main ones are:
title This comes up at the top of your browser and is the first line of your entry on a Google search. This should be short, or the most important aspects should be at the start
description: This comes up as the second part of your Google, Yahoo or MSN listing. Your description should be relevant to the site content
keywords: this is where you put the keywords that you found in Part 1. It is usually best to put a few, relevant keywords, rather than cram in as many as you can type. Search engines usually downgrade you if they perceive that your keywords are not relevant. When I researched my own site, I found that people searching for freelance writers also search for ‘write articles’; those searching for ghostwriters also searched for ‘write your life story’, so I've included those in my metatags.

Where else can I put keywords?

You can also put keywords into
author: put your name and company name here; people will use these to search for you.
alt tags: these are used to give additional information about images. When you hover your mouse over an image the text you sometimes see is contained in the alt tags. You can put keywords in these as well. They are also indexed by search engines.

Example: hover your mouse over the picture on any WritingUp blog. The text you see is in an alt tag.

How do I put keywords into my website content?

So far, so good. Now you need to make those same keywords part of your content (again, avoiding putting too many in an obvious way). Make a list of the keywords you want to use, then start to write your page content, using the most important keywords a couple of times each.

Tip: One of the ways you can make search engines take more notice of these keywords is by using emphasis. Heading tags (h1, h2, h3), strong or b (to make text bold) highlight the parts of the page you think are worth paying attention to and Google, Yahoo and MSN will take notice of them too.

Now you know how to find relevant keywords for SEO and what to do with them once you've got them. In part three, I'll look at another technique for on-page search engine optimisation.

Related posts:

How I Put My Site On Steroids
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Research

Alphabet Soup Results

A post I did earlier in the week on character development proved to be great fun, and sparked another one on plot development, which was just as much fun but harder to complete. Here, for your edification, are the ABCs of plot development, as suggested by a few hardy contributors.

A is for Agenda
B is for Betrayal
C is for Characters
D is for Development of plot - do you know where the story is going?
E is for Environment: Where are you anyway?
F is for Focus: back story, direction, characters
G is for Good googy moogy: twists and turns
H is for Hurry up..the plot sure is dragging now
I is for Interest (as in love interest)
J is for January, June, July...just what time does your story take place in?
K is for Killers
L is for Links between plots and subplots
M is for Motivation - whether it is money, murder, or madness.
N is for need. What does the plot need ? What do the characters need?
O is for Offshore bank accounts
P is for Plot twists and protagonists.
Q is for Quick: Let's not drag the plot on too long
R is for Redundancies, as in, make sure your plot and dialogue have none.
S is for Sex and you'd better have some and make it dirty
T is for Teleplay (and hope we can get a movie out of the book)
U is for Upsets - things that you just didn't think were going to happen
V is for Vivid description, make sure your audience can see, taste, and feel.
W is for Whispers, warnings, wickedness and other plot spicers
X is for Xanadu - that elusive paradise your readers should enter if you've done your job correctly.
Y is for Yesterdays and youth - events in the past that affect the story in the present.
Z is for Zenith: the climax of the story

Players:
Katryn
swissmiss
Keywoman1
wcbelew
SenseChange
merryone

Related posts:
Do You Know Your ABCs? (the original post that set us all off)
Alphabet Soup(the ABCs of plot with all the comments in full)

How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Research

Search engine optimization (SEO) costs money. There are lots of people out there who will charge you lots of money to make sure that Google, Yahoo and MSN will find your website. But when I wanted to increase my search engine ranking a few months ago, I didn't have the budget to pay anyone to do it for me. What I needed was a do-it-yourself approach to website promotion. I did some reading, tried a few things and realised that it was easy to promote my site myself if I could devote a couple of hours a week to doing it properly. This is how I started:

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of making it easy for Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines to find and index your pages. The easier it is for search engines to find your pages, the more likely it is that someone will come to your website and offer you work or buy a product you've offered for sale. SEO increases traffic to your site or blog and, in the case of WritingUp, makes it more likely that someone will click on your ads and rack up those Adsense earnings.

How do I optimize my website?

If you're launching a site from scratch, you start with keyword research. If you're updating an old site, start with keyword research. If you want to bring traffic to your blog (and can write about anything), start with ... (you get the idea). You need to think about what keywords best describe your website, business or blog and what similar keywords people are looking for on Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.

What will keyword research cost me?

Zilch. Zip. Nada. Bupkes. You can pay if you want to, but there are a few free tools you can use that will work well if you're on a tight budget. They are:

Overture
Wordtracker/Overture
Adwords analyzer

These tools are simple to use. You type the keywords you want into the form, enter and you get back a list of related keywords or the number of times those keywords have been searched in the past month. Once you've identified the keywords that are best for you, you need to put them into your page content. This is covered in Part 2 of the series.

Blogging Made Easy

A few weeks ago I came across a great article on Performancing, which I've been meaning to share with you. The article is titled How To Launch A New Blog The Easy Way. In it, Chris Garrett gives seven steps you should follow to launch your blog. It covers:

1. Planning
2. Design
3. Content
4. Links
5. Promotion
6. Publish
7. Advertise

Along the way, it references a lot of other Performancing posts that we here at WritingUp could learn from (although our blogs have already been launched). Chris advises patience in waiting for the traffic to roll in:

there is not much here that is not just plain common sense. Luckily, common sense is not necessarily common practice so by doing these basic things and plugging away eventually you will have a success on your hands.

It's definitely worth a read.

And I've had a thought: if everyone tagged their best posts with 'WritingUp, the posts would soon be picked up by Technorati and then Google wouldn't be far behind. That way we'd all benefit.

Alphabet Soup

My last entry was about using the letters of the alphabet to describe your characters and make them come to life. Keywoman and Katryn suggested a new thread for plot. So here it is ... Jump in, everybody.

If you're interested, here are the ABCs we came up with for character:

A is for Age - how old is your character?
B is for Build - is your character short or tall?
C is for Color - what is your character's skin color or ethnicity?
D is for Distinguishing Marks - any scars, marks, scratches?
E is for Eyes - color, size, shape?
F is for Face - shape?
G is for Girth - is your character stocky or thin?
H is for Hair - color, length, style?
I is for Interests - what does your character like to do?
J is for

• Jellybeans - what's the character's favorite flavor?
• Jumpy - is the character calm or jumpy?
• Jocular - does your character have a sense of humor?
• Jauntiness - does your character have style?
• Je ne sais quoi - does your character have ... that certain indescribable something?

K is for

• Kindness (or lack there of)
• Kin - does your character have family? How do they relate? How have they impacted your character?

L is for Love (who is/was/will be the love of their life)
M is for Motivation
N is for Needs
O is for Opinionated. Does your character have an opinion on everything? Nothing? What issues would your character be stubborn about their beliefs in?
P can be for perfect, priceless, person with preliminary issues about pets
Q is for

• qualities - what kind of qualities does your character have?
• questioning - does your character want to investigate everything and find out the reasons why?

S is for Sexuality - and anything and everything pertaining to sex
R is for race or region
T is for temperament - is your character placid? Short tempered? Neurotic? Emotional? Vulcan-like?
U is for uniqueness - what unique characteristics does your character have
V is for virtue and viciousness (or lack thereof) or va va voom!
W is for wisdom, picked up through the years (or again, lack there of)
X is for Xanadu. What are the character's fantasies/wildest dreams?
Y is for Yearnings
Z is for zig zag...can your character make up his/her mind which direction they will ultimately end up going?

The players: Katryn, rosie deerfield, Keywoman1, Haven, ladyscrapper , saphirdragonfly , Ethan Mawyer , wcbelew

Do You Know Your ABCs?

I've written before about inspiration popping up in the most unlikely places and today's post is a good example. One day, about a week ago, I was sitting in the sauna at my health club, when a man I didn't know started to talk to me. It turned out he was an aikido instructor and former military man and somehow we got onto the subject of crime fighting. One of the difficulties in catching criminals, he said, was the inability of victims of crime to describe their attackers properly. Barry said there was an easy way to remember the attributes you needed to describe. Writer that I am, I immediately saw his list as a way of describing characters in a story or novel. Here they are:

A is for Age - how old is your character?
B is for Build - is your character short or tall?
C is for Color - what is your character's skin color or ethnicity?
D is for Distinguishing Marks - any scars, marks, scratches?
E is for Eyes - color, size, shape?
F is for Face - shape?
G is for Girth - is your character stocky or thin?
H is for Hair - color, length, style?

That's as far as we got before the conversation ended. I ran into him again a few days later and asked whether there were any more. As he pointed out, you could use the same letters for different attributes (H for Hands, for example) and you could keep going till the end of the alphabet. So here's my challenge: can you fill in the rest of the alphabet? I'll start you off with this one:

I is for Interests - what does your character like to do?

Come on, writers, have a go!

Paperless Society? Ha!

Overwhelmed

If you're a writer, there's no such thing as the paperless society. At least, there isn't for me. When I started out in journalism, my desk was always covered with the stories I was working on (this was before computers). As a sub-editor, I also had to deal with other people's stories that I was subbing as well as my own work. When I became an editor, even more stuff was added to the pile: draft page layouts, advertising copy, book proposals and so on. Once I began working from home, I had all my personal stuff to organise as well. And even though I've always known where everything is, at times the mountain of paper has threatened to overwhelm me.

Six Trays

Luckily for me, a piece of advice came along just when I needed it. This came to me third hand, but was originally from a management guru, who suggested that you organise your stuff by filing it into six trays. The trays are labelled as follows:

• Do now
• Do soon
• File
• Read
• Awaiting information
• Pass on

The labels are self-explanatory, but the key to the system is to file your mail as soon as it comes in. Decide which tray it fits into and deal with it appropriately (not forgetting the round file as a seventh option). Then go back to the 'do now' tray and deal with what's in it. Stuff in the 'do soon' tray should be sorted out within the week. Do the reading when you have time and get rid of anything that needs to passed on. Finally, when the information that you're waiting for has come in, you should then be able to put it in one of the other trays.

This has made an enormous difference to me. My stuff is better organised and I have an order in which to deal with things. The paper mountain hasn't disappeared, but it's shrunk to the size of a hill!

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