Write SEO Articles Without Sounding Like a Salesman

Writing SEO articles can become a little repetitive, and it is easy to lapse into a pattern of using the same phrases over and over again. Here are a few tips to keep your SEO articles interesting for both you you and your readers.

Write SEO Articles like you are speaking

I can't say this enough: write your SEO articles as if you are speaking to someone. Imagine that you are working for the company you are writing for, and speaking to a potential customer. Instead of using cliche sales phrases, be 'honest' about the product you are selling. Tell them in detail what it could do for them, and why it is good value.

Use Keywords Constructively

Before you start your SEO article, think of a few good ways to use your keywords. Make the sentence in each paragraph that contains your keyword interesting and informative. Your reader found this page because of your keyword, so make your SEO articles as relevant to your keywords as possible.

Be Specific

Don't waffle. The main thing that sets $3 SEO articles apart from $10 ones is their ability to inform the reader. Any 3rd language English speaker can sound like an infomercial for 500 words. You can do better, so write SEO articles as if you are an expert on the product you are selling. Describe it in detail, giving different price options and color schemes, etc. You can easily fill up 500 words on a single product if you give enough detail.

Remember: the higher the quality of your SEO articles, the more money you can charge your clients for them. Because we are in a bulk business increasing your per article rate by $1 or $2 can drastically increase your income.

Seo Articles

Why I Use Google for Damn Near Everything

Google has really come a long way since its inception. Most people still think of Google as a search engine, but to me the G-Men have a lot more to offer. For starters you might have noticed their little acquisition of a website called YouTube, which made instant multi-billionaires out of two punks just like yourself.

This has little effect on users of YouTube and Google, but the guys at Google have a lot more to offer. For starters, I use Gmail. This is the starting point most people use to create their Google accounts, and it gives you access to the best online email system by far, and all of the other cool G-stuff.

Next up, I use the iGoogle homepage as my script aggregator. If you subscribe to any feeds or posts using bloglines, technorati, digg or anything like that you can do it all easier and better on iGoogle. On my front page is my email, a currency converter, a to-do list a Wikipedia search bar, the weather and a George Bush quote generator, because he makes me laugh.

This is not the end, because I have 2 other tabs of feeds - one for blogs I like and have subscribed to, and another for tools like my instant .doc to .pdf converter (which is something I've been hunting after for a long time) and a few other gadgets that I use less often. It makes an excellent home page, and I can see what's going on in my little universe all of the time.

This is all pretty run of the mill stuff, but just go and check out the Google Products to see what they have available at the moment. It's all free and there is a lot of useful stuff. I would recommend the Google Pack (You can see a link to this on the right) if you want to protect your computer and keep everything running smoothly for free.

The most exciting bit of it all, though, is Google Labs. This is where they work on all of the cool stuff. Google Earth (the full 3D interactive map of the earth up to resolutions of a few centimeters) was one of the first graduates of the labs, but a lot of cool things are coming up. There is even a rumor of a complete Google Operating System coming being dreamed up, but this is unconfirmed.

I just have to say, you gotta love a company that gives its employees free foot massages and allows them to work on their own personal projects once a week, with full pay. You might love their search engine or hate it, but the cool stuff they are turning out is really worth a look.

Google Stuff

SEO - An Ethical Debate

SEO practices have come under a lot of scrutiny by those who strive to keep the internet a user-friendly and safe resource. There are methods of making your website more search-engine friendly, and there is almost no control over how you employ these. Some of them are considered ethical, and others are not. What are these distinctions, and why should webmasters not exploit every loophole they can to get more traffic?

Traffic means money, and many webmasters will do anything to secure more traffic. The Google Information for Webmasters lays down some criteria for the ethical optimization of pages, which I encourage everyone to read, even if you don't own a website. If you write SEO articles for a living, you might like to know exactly what your work is doing to the internet.

Recently I did some articles for certain multi-level marketing sites. These guys essentially sell software that sets up and maintains an affiliate network. When you give them money, they give you the software and tell you how to sucker in other saps and show them how to sucker in yet more saps. They used to call this a "pyramid scheme", but somehow this one has managed to slip through the cracks.

In my opinion these sites should not be drawing any traffic. One look at their keyword META tags tells you that these guys will do anything to get traffic. Just about any search for anything to do with money, business, marketing etc brings up one of this network's sites, all of which are almost identical.

But now, the honest people on the net face a problem. Either they can jump in and use 'bastard' SEO techniques to compete, or they can stick with being honest, keeping their keywords to a minimum and providing good, relevant content. So why should they do this?

Google's corporate motto is "Don't be evil", and evil is exactly what they strive to weed out. They continually update their algorithms to ensure that sites using underhand SEO techniques do not get traffic. Their stated goal is to create a search environment that rewards webmasters who devote their time to giving their users a valuable experience, rather than looking for loopholes. Eventually, this will happen.

As SEO writers, we generally do not have control over who our client websites are. However, I have refused projects for unethical websites in the past and I urge you to do the same. There is nothing wrong with trying to sell a product, and trying to get a competitive edge. On the other hand, if you have the best products, the best prices and the best value and you get your name out there, your business will succeed.

This is especially true on the internet. As I wrote in my eZine Article one person telling his friends about your site will bring in some traffic, but all of these people want to see your site. This is preferable to a thousand visitors who found your site when they were looking for something else that is more relevant. These users will simply see that your site does not have what they are looking for, and will leave.

This is basically one approach to SEO, and one that I hope will gain greater ground. You can check out my eZine article on the subject here. It's easy to read and it gets into some more interesting stuff, like John Nash's Game Theory (the guy from A Beautiful Mind). Go check it out!

Other SEO topics

How To Write SEO Articles

A lot of people ask me what exactly goes into SEO articles. There are a few things you need know about how to write SEO articles:


What are SEO articles?

An SEO article is usually around 500 words, and contains a certain keyword, repeated a certain number of times. These keywords are what site owners think users will type into search engines like Google. If you are looking for a place to rent in Southern California for example, the keyword you might type in would be "rental home Southern California". This can be difficult to use in a proper sentence.

How do you keyword optimize effectively?

A general rule with SEO articles is that search engines don't like keywords that are broken by other words, but don't notice if they are broken by punctuation. So you could use the keyword above like this: "Looking for a rental home? Southern California has many..." and presto - it reads perfectly!

What is keyword density?

Keyword density is a measure of how often a keyword appears in SEO articles. If the article is 500 words long and the keyword appears 10 times, the keyword density is 2%. Depending on many different factors, I know that Google likes keyword densities around 2%, but this could go as high as 8%. Too many keywords and your article looks "funny" to Google, while too little means it could be overlooked.

What is keyword proximity?

Basically, this is how close together your keywords are - and exactly why "rental home Southern California" should not be broken by words. If it is, then a site that doesn't break this keyword up in its SEO articles will get a higher search engine ranking.

What is keyword prominence?

This is not usually a concern for people who write SEO articles. It is a measure of where in the HTML code your keywords appear, and how important these places are. The best places are in the HEAD and TITLE tags of your page - without keywords in these places most search engines won't even look at your SEO articles.

So how do you actually write SEO articles?

If you find yourself with SEO articles to write, the best thing to do is go to the client's website and look at what they actually do. Going by just the keyword can be disastrous! If you are given "Health Insurance Indiana" as a keyword, and you write about how great our health insurance is, it could be embarrassing if all the client's website does is compare quotes from health insurance companies!

I find that if you come across a point that isn't in the client's website, it's usually easier to make up something new than to research it elsewhere. If you have a 500 word article, try to come up with 5 different points about the company, relevant to the keyword. It also helps to use the keyword a few different ways, as this confuses Google's spiders into thinking that your SEO articles have a lot of information about the topic searched for. (But this is really more of my pet theory and the theory of some of my clients)

Anyway, I found a good resource for all of this kind of information. Mike Wong has a cool site about SEO marketing and such and such. He tries to sell you a lot of things, but he has piles of info for free. Check out Mike's website here.

SEO articles

Make Money Doing What I do

What Do I Do?

Hi everyone. I'm Chase, and I started this blog to tell people like me with no IT or internet background how they can make money online by sitting at home in their pajamas. I live in South Africa, but you can do this from anywhere. It's the perfect first career for anyone who got themselves a humanities or arts degree and has no idea what to do next.

This blog's spot is WriteNonsense, and that is exactly what I do. A recent estimate claims that there are currently 150 billion domain names on the internet (excluding individual blogs or personal pages like Myspace and Facebook). While at least a third of these are porn sites, and at least half the traffic on the internet at any one time is on porn sites, that still leaves a lot of sites that need content, and a lot of people don't know how to write!

I'll tell you how to make money online by exploiting the pornography industry later, but the important thing to remember is that the internet is the most important advertising space available. The millions and millions of people online all of the time always contain at least a million or so potential buyers of just about every product. Getting these buyers onto your site can mean the difference from having a Mom & Pop store and being a retail giant who retires at 35.

Another important thing to realize is that people use Google. Just about everyone uses Google, or another search engine that works pretty much the same way. These search engines are fallible in two ways. The first is that they can be tricked, and the second is that they can be bought. Ever see the Google Paid Ads section? These ads respond to the keywords you type in. When Google looks for your keywords, it finds pages with large pieces of text (it can't tell if a picture file contains "boobs"). When it finds the keywords you entered in this text, it gives the page a point. Basically, the more points, the higher up the ranking it goes. Hopefully if the page is just what you are looking for, it will come out on top.

But we all know that doesn't happen. Pretty much every search returns a page or two who want to sell you something, and these are normally in the first five. That is because they have paid for Search Engine Optimization. I will explain the many parts of SEO in another post, but what you need to know is that companies pay money for it because it is a good way to get traffic to their site. This means that you can make money online writing pages of text for websites that are quick and easy to write - and you get paid in US Dollars.

There are a lot of different things to know about SEO, web copy writing and the associated fields. In this blog I will tell you about as many as I know about, and I invite others to give their input on how they make money by writing online. I will tell you how to get clients, what sites you can join for free that generate a lot of lucrative work, how to improve your writing style and article return time, and how to get yourself set up so that you can get paid as soon as possible. I will be posting regularly, so check back every other day or so until I get my feed up and running. I'm not going to ask you to send me money - All of this info is totally free and I will be posting it right here on WriteNonsense.blogspot.com!