Search Engine Optimization for Young Adult Writers' Websites

Tip of the Day: Watch those compound verbs! Search begin, start, and continue in your manuscript. Change "He began to cry" to "He cried"; "She started to panic" to "She panicked" wherever you possibly can.

I've been looking at freelance writing jobs, where the hot buzzword is SEO writing. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a way of writing articles and web site copy that makes it easier to find those pages in Google, Bing, and Yahoo Search.

Interested in how your web site or blog can be "search engine optimized"? It's a lot easier than that acronym makes it sound.

1. If you want to know how search engines get their search results, check out seomoz.org's Beginner's Guide to SEO.

2. If your site name and logo only show up in graphics, search engines can't hit the text. Make sure your name is in text, not only in graphic banners.

3. Label images. You'd be surprised how many people use Google Images to do searches these days.

4. Avoid directories that charge you to list your web site. Search engines tend to mark those links as spam.

5. Search engines find sites by web crawling through tunnels of links. Link to reputable sites in your articles to become easier to find in the tunnels.

6. When naming articles, use the term you think people might search. Hopefully this article will come up near the top if I search "Search engine optimization for young adult writers" in Google. (This should be a good experiment.)

7. And the tip you already know: the more interesting your content, the better chance it will be shared on Twitter, Facebook, etc. The most popular websites come up first in searches, so as always, it's all about the writing.

-- Kate, Miss Perfecting the Pages