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December 1, 2021

How Using Good SEO Techniques Can Improve Your Writing

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Knowing SEO writing techniques can improve your writing, whether you are a blogger, a freelancer, a business owner, or an author. If you are writing for an online audience (writing for a website or blog), knowing a few key things can help you.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the cornerstone of ranking highly on search engines, particularly Google. Search engines use an algorithm to choose how to rank the sites on the Internet, in accordance with the search term or query that you put into the search bar.

SEO aims to optimize your website in a variety of ways so that your site is as close to the number one spot as possible. Since over 25% of people click on the first Google result, it’s easy to see why SEO is important. As a writer, you might be a little skeptical about the effect SEO might have on your creativity when writing. However, writers can actually learn a lot by writing with SEO in mind.

Let’s take a look at what you should bear in mind, and why.

Keywords

The term “keyword” doesn’t just apply to single words. Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that help the algorithm pin down the best websites for you, which are based on these super-specific terms.

Writing with keywords in mind can be a useful way to focus your writing and make sure that you’re not going off track. They are also a key part of SEO, as they help the algorithm connect users with content that is useful and relevant for their search terms. By using them, you are showing the reader that you have understood their needs and are providing them with valuable information. Make sure to avoid “keyword stuffing,” though, which is where you use as many keywords as possible. Keyword stuffing makes your writing look completely unnatural.

Completing keyword research can also be helpful for you as a writer to find out what you should be writing about next. You can use tools such as Ubersuggest to help you. However, if you’d rather keep your focus on your writing, it can be worth outsourcing this task to a specialist, which will cost around C$440 per month. Regardless of what you do, it’s always best to follow the SEO Rules for Blogging Success.

Structure

Good SEO writing should be divided into sections using header tags. These tags work in a cascading system, with <h1> as the title tag, <h2> as a subheading, and so on. These tags help provide the content with structure, as well as make it easier for the reader to see what the article will cover. For SEO optimization, header tags make it easier for search engine bots to crawl the pages and categorize them.

Header tags are discussed in How to Develop a Great Writing Process. That post also shows you how to use them, and provides you with a sample topic as an example of how to structure a blog post using header tags. It also gives you

As a writer, defining your structure before you start can be great for making sure that you keep your piece relevant, as well as ensuring that you have covered everything that you wanted to.

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Write for Your Audience

As a writer, you want to make sure that you’re impacting your reader and providing them with worthwhile content. You should also write in a conversational tone. In addition to doing keyword research, you should also dedicate some time to looking at your competitors and reading things they’ve written. Read More

November 28, 2021

Interview with Freelance Writing Agency Owner David Leonhardt

image of Lorraine Reguly and David Leonhardt

4David Leonhardt is a freelance writing agency owner. He runs THGM Writers, a freelance writing agency that services primarily individuals and small businesses. You might remember him from when he gave you advice about what to do when your writing business grows too big for its britches.

Today, he’s here to participate in an exclusive interview, where he will reveal things he’s never revealed online before! I asked him to be a guest again because many freelance writers eventually pivot, and take their business in a new direction. For me, it was changing the focus to freelance editing instead of writing. For David, it was taking his business to another level by turning his business into an agency (where there is less work to do and the profit is bigger).

Whatever you decide to do with your freelance writing business is up to you. My advice is to find a decision you are happy with, so you experience positivity every day of your life! After all, being happy is part of your entrepreneurial excellence!

Interview with Freelance Writing Agency Owner David Leonhardt

1: How and when did you get into freelance writing?

– Were you initially a blogger who guest-posted and got hired by someone to write posts for their site?

– How did you find your writing gigs THEN?

– Are you still a freelance writer?

– If so, how do find your writing gigs NOW?

This is a long story (but I’ll make it short). I did not set out to be a writer. I actually set out to be a motivational speaker. I wrote my book. I set up my website. I discovered I was good at SEO. This was back in 2003-2004. Yes, there was SEO back then! So. I wrote about SEO and website promotion.

A couple of articles later (in particular, one on WebPro News writing about Google’s November 2003 algorithm update), I had three standing SEO clients. I wrote to promote their websites and to promote my services. And I wrote just for fun, because I have always loved to write. The more I wrote, the more people asked me to write for them. But those were mostly one-offs—the real money at the time was in monthly SEO clients.

Although I run a freelance writer agency now, I do very little of the writing myself. I’ve taken on a day job to reduce the feast-or-famine effects of ghostwriting, and I am more efficient having team members write the big projects. I still write wedding speeches (best man, maid-of-honor, etc.), some blog articles, some short bios, etc. Just the small, fun stuff for me. I also spend my spare time hiking and climbing rocks!

David rock climbing

October 7, 2020

Why My Focus is on Freelance Editing (+ Why I Stopped Freelance Writing)

Freelance editing is what I am made to do!

My focus is now on freelance editing instead of freelance writing.

Do you think you’re made for editing instead of writing?

I have always loved words and I have always loved writing.

When I first started blogging and got an offer to write an article a month for Dear Blogger, I decided to try my hand at freelance writing. This was all before Wording Well was born… back in 2013.

When I founded Wording Well in 2014, I started out offering only freelance writing services. It wasn’t until later that I began offering editing services. Looking back, I realize that I should’ve had my focus on freelance editing all along. It’s what I love to do most of all!

Is freelance editing “your thing”?

If you want to become a freelance editor, check this out!

There are so many awesome things about being an editor. These are 12 benefits of being a freelance editor that I get to enjoy EVERY DAY.

How I Built Up My Freelance Editing Reputation

I used to get free books from authors I met online in exchange for my promise to write a book review for them.

I did this for many authors. Most of them were relatively unknown… but I really lucked out when the famous author, Lisa Jackson, saw that blog post, sent me a Tweet, and then took me up on this offer!

I was thrilled when she sent me an autographed book because she has been one of my favorite authors for years!

Lisa Jackson's autograph on my copy of "Tell Me"

While reading books published by authors I met online, I noticed that many of them didn’t have a good editor. I ended up editing their books for them!

At first, I did this for free. This is how I started to build my reputation as an editor. (Remember, I was an unknown editor back then!)

Why I Began to Diversify My Services to Focus on Freelance Editing

After editing for free for a while, I realized two things:

1: It takes a lot of time to edit a novel. (It takes longer to edit a novel than reading it does!)

2: My time was valuable. Read More

September 30, 2020

Everything You Need to Know about Page Jumps

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PAGE JUMPS

Page jumps are not hard to create and they are very, very useful.

What are they? What do they do?

Why should bloggers use them, and when?

This post will answer all of these questions. I promise. Plus, I will make the whole concept of page jumps easy for you to understand, and teach you how to create them.

By the end of this article, I bet you will want to try experimenting with some of your own!

Everything you need to know about them can be found in this article!

To help demonstrate how page jumps work, I have prepared a list of the contents of this article. Whichever link you click on will bring you to that particular section of the page!

Guest Posting and Guest Hosting: Best Practices

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Guest posting. What is it, and why do it? What are the pros and cons?

What is guest hosting? Why host guest bloggers?

What qualities do great guests and hosts have? What are the rules? Who makes them up?

These are some of the questions you may have about guest posting and hosting and, whatever your experience with it—as guest, host, both, or neither—you will have answers to these questions by the time you finish this post. Guaranteed.

Today I will:

1: Define guest posting and guest hosting.

2: Tell you some pros and cons about guest posting and guest hosting.

3: Provide you with some guest-i-quette and host-i-quette best practices (etiquette that guests and hosts should follow).

A Brief Intro to Guest Posting

Guests don’t always follow proper guest posting etiquette, and hosts don’t always provide clear guidelines for guests to follow. As a result, more time is often spent emailing each other back and forth instead of on the post itself, trying to figure out what’s going on, what’s expected of them, and resolving problems.

How can this situation be rectified?

The solution is actually quite simple: Know what is required of you—whether you’re a guest OR a host.

The fact is that there are often many problems that arise simply because many bloggers have not developed their own set of guidelines for their guests to follow and many guests don’t know the best practices of offering someone a guest post.