Freelance Writing 101

You asked for it....Writing Info:

Learn First, Write Later:

Keywords ****Must read!
http://blog-guide.blogspot.com/2008/05/getting-your-blog-to-rank-highly-in.html
More on Keywords ***Must Read!
http://thehappyhubber.hubpages.com/hub/Using-Keywords-in-your-HUB-for-Search-Engine-Ranking
Blog Organization Using Labels as Categories
http://blog-guide.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-add-labels-or-categories-to-your.html
Blogger Gadgets in the top of the Post Column
http://blog-guide.blogspot.com/2008/07/blogger-gadgets-on-top-of-post-column.html

Getting Started:

1.  You need an account with Google Adsense if you don't have one already.

2.  I recommend Blogger (www.blogger.com) to write a blog on.  Blogger is owned by Google and makes it really easy to set up to work with Adsense.  Once you have an adsense account number, you'll see where you can add that into Blogger and set up ads directly within blogger.  You DO NOT need to set up ads in Adsense and paste code into blogger.

3. Now that you have a Blog set up, go back to adsense.  You can create a channel in AdSense for your blog.  If you have more than one blog, or you publish articles to hubpage (we'll talk about that later), then create a channel for each of these.  Then you can see which blogs and which articles are earning money and how much.  This will help you write more about the topics that earn you the most money.

4.  Next set up an account with StatCounter (http://statcounter.com/).  This is free. StatCounter will allow you to see how many people are visiting your blog, which pages they look at, how they found you (direct enter your site address or through a search engine), and what keywords they searched for to find you.  StatCounter will give you instructions on how to put their code on your blog.  Put a StatCounter on each and every blog you create.  This will allow to you know which keywords are bringing you people and which topics are the most popular.  Check it at least once a month.

5.  Hubpages (www.hubpages.com) - this site if free to join and allows you to publish articles on any topic you want.  You can earn ad revenue directly from Hubpages but also connect it to your Adsense account.  They do a profit share on the Adsense revenue but they're pretty fair about it.  The up side to this site is you can write on random topics and they help to drive traffic to your articles.  You can link to your blogs in your profile too.  You can also get ebay and amazon revenue but it's never done me any good and seems like a waste of advertising space.  This site is also very easy to use.

Submitting your Writing to Search Engines and Pinging:

Submit the URL for each article or blog post you write.  Not the site URL such as myblog.blogspot.com but full URL to get to just that article (such as the ones I provided above in the education section.)
Pingler
http://www.pingler.com/
Google
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?continue=/addurl&pli=1
Bing/Yahoo/MSN
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url

Tools:

Research Keywords to get ideas for similar keywords and phrases.  Also look for keywords that have a high search volume and/or low competition.
https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS
Google Hot Searches:
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
Google Trends:
Shows you the search popularity of a keyword over time.
http://www.google.com/trends/

Finding Other Writing Jobs:

You will need a few good samples of your writing style and skill online before you apply to online and freelance writing work.
About.comhttp://beaguide.about.com/gdapplynow.htm
Blogger Jobs:
http://www.bloggerjobs.biz/
Search Tempest will allow you to search Craigslist over multiple locations at once.  Since Freelance Writing Jobs are not generally tied to a location, this is the best way to look.  You can find real writing work in here, and you can find a lot of scams.  Be careful.
http://www.searchtempest.com/

Cuil Search Engine turns Google Results on its Head

Cuil, launched on July 28,2008, has taken the search engine to a whole new level. Cuil's unique approach to search combines the largest index of Web pages to ever exist with content-based relevance. The result, highly relevant, spam free (or at least less) search results that surpass Google's wildest dreams.


Cuil for Searchers
Cuil searches for and ranks pages based mainly on their content and relevance. When Cuil finds a page with your keywords it then analyzes the rest of the page for not only more keywords but its content, its concepts, its coherency and how it all relates to each other. These innovative algorithms provide highly relevant results.

Cuil doesn't stop there. Oh no, search results that are immediately more relevant then Google are not good enough. The results themselves are not just a bland list of links with some text that might make sense. Cuil organizes the search results to make it easier to find the information you want. The search results are organized into columns that are read from left to right and top to bottom. The results are sorted by ideas and offer images and full text descriptions. Cuil’s goal is to guide you towards answers to the questions you’re not even sure how to ask.

Cuils Features:

Navigation Suggestion
As you begin your search, a drop down box may appear below the search field with potential search terms and sometimes even a direct website.

Drilldown
Cuil's drilldown is a panel that appears on the righ-hand side of the search results that provides you with a list of related search terms. Roll-over one of those terms and box will pop-up with the defintion of the term.

Tabs
Cuil's tabs at the top of the search page also offer ways to clarify your search and narrow your choices.

What Cuil means for Webmasters and Spammers:
Cuil has developed new architecture and algorithms designed to handle and even organized the mammoth porportions of the internet. For the millions of honest hard working webmasters who toil day in and day out to deliver useful knowledge to the world, your day has come. For spammers, well none of us liked you to begin with and we won't mourn you when your gone.

Cuil puts a far larger emphasis on page content and relevance. While they recognize that popularity has its usefullness it is not the sole or even the best means of determining a site's value in relation to a give search term. Establishing relevancy is more than a numbers game. Cuil prefers to find all the pages with your keyword or phrase and then analyze the rest of the content on those pages.

As Cuil grows in popularity, SEO will see some dramatic changes. Scouring the internet to find social networks, blogs, directories, forums and other places to put links to yourself will become more a waste of time, as it should be, and quality content will truly become king and take its rightful throne on the top of the search results hill.

Webmaster's Submit your site to Cuil here.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. If knowledge is power, then more power to Cuil.

Search Cuil here.

Or go here and download a toolbar that lets you Cuil search directly from the browser.

Free Online SEO Tools

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) must be high on your priority list if you are blogging with the intent that people will actually read what you write.  The good news is you don't have to do it all on your own.  There are a lot of different tools out there to help you analyze, track and improve your blog's SEO.   Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal has just put together a list of 142+ free SEO tools.  Read Online SEO Tools - the Ulimate Collection here.

Keywords for Search Engine Success

By Craig Andrews

When it comes to acquiring traffic the proper use of keywords on a blog or website can never be underestimated. Many times, the traffic to your blog is acquired by people stumbling onto your entries via the various search engines. This means you need to manipulate your blog entries' placements in the search engine and the best way to do this would be to sprinkle your entry with common keywords that make the blog more search engine friendly. Keywords are simply general topic words someone plugs in the search engines and then the search engine looks for matches to these words on websites or blogs. If you blog properly uses keywords then the odds of people finding your blog through the search engines is significantly increased.

Let's say your blog deals with professional baseball you would need to select certain keywords in your blog entries that people would commonly plug into a search engine when the subject of professional baseball is concerned. Examples of the types of keywords to use would be "Major League Baseball," "MLB," "professional baseball", "World Series", "American League," "National League," et al. Of course, the multitude of keywords you could use are fairly vast but they should be general enough that they are words most commonly used.

If you are unsure of what type of keywords to use for your blog you needed worry though. There are subscriptions services that keep track of keywords for a particular phrase and which keywords are used most often. Most of these services can be subscribed to for a nominal fee per month. The way they work is simple. Let's say your blog was about Halloween costumes and you wanted people to discover your blog entry on gorilla costumes you would plug in the words gorilla costume and see what keywords are the most used. (FYI - the most common keywords in this particular search would be "Halloween gorilla costume" and "adult gorilla costume".) Using such a service is highly recommended as it takes the guesswork out of selecting keywords.

It is important, however, to use keywords sparingly as overuse of keywords can backfire as the search engines may look at the blog entry as having spammed itself with keywords so as to manipulate traffic. So, instead of doing this it is best to use a particular keyword 2 or 3 times per 100 words in the entry. This will usually bring about the best results and drive a tremendous amount of search engine traffic to your site.

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Getting Your Blog to Rank Highly In Search Engines

There is little point in writing a blog if no one comes to read it. Blogs are automatically search engine friendly because of their fresh content and clean formatting, but there are a few easy techniques you can use to improve your rankings.

A few words about keywords:

1. Choose your Keywords wisely.
You can choose to write on a topic, or for a key word or phrase, that is immensely popular and has a ton of competition, and never stand a chance of getting in the top page or two of rankings. Or you can choose similar but more targeted keyword or phrase with less competition be in the top 10 listings. Google Keyword Tool

2. Key Word or Phrase? That is the next question.
Most people do not use a single word for a search engine query. The often search a phrase or even type an entire question. This is not necessarily the most efficient way to search, but it is the most natural. So do not think you need to limit yourself to single key word. A key phrase of three – five words is entirely appropriate.

3. Choose your URL wisely.
Once you have chosen your keyword, it is time to choose your URL wisely. Whether your blog is hosted by your blogging software, on your own domain or subdomain. You want your primary keyword to be in your domain name (URL).

4. Keyword Placement
Besides having your primary key word in your URL, you also want it to appear the header tags and titles of your posts.

5. Keyword usage in the body of your post
When writing each post you of course want to use your primary keyword(s) in the text, but don’t over do it or you’ll sound like spam. Always write in a natural, reader friendly manner. This is also the place put a few secondary keywords as well.

6. Keywords in Links
Keywords that appear in links are more important than those in plain text. So where appropriate, when linking to another blog or website, use your keywords in the text of links.

7. Keyword Categories
Another natural place to put your keywords in your Category names.

Keywords are not the only thing search engines consider when ranking your blog. Here are few other areas to consider:

Links

Links that point to your blog and posts are very important to building pagerank.

1. Search Engines and Directories
Being listed in search engines and directories provide great single direction links. So make sure you submit your blog, first of all to dmoz.org. This is end all, be all to internet directories and is a place that most search engines pull from to find websites to spider. After than submit directly to the major search engines, that way they know you exist. Finally, submit to the blog search engines and various free directories.

Here is a well respected list of Blog Directories by Robin Good.

2. Articles
Turn some of your blog posts into articles and submit them to the article directories. This will get you more linkbacks.

3. Comment
Leave appropriate comments on forums and other blogs with a link to your site in the comment.

Updates

1. Update your blog.

The more fresh content you have, the happier the spiders are. Some blogging software will even let you write posts in advance and schedule them to be posted on certain days.

2. Ping
After you update your blog, you’ll want to “ping” the search engines to let them know you have new content. That will get your site spidered more often. You can us the Ping-O-Matic tool to ping a lot of search engines all at once. Alternately, if you use Feedburner, for your RSS distribution, they have a tool that will automatically ping the search engines when you update your blog.

Follow these few easy guidelines and see your blog listed in the search engines in no time.

Improve Search Engine Rank by Pinging

You have updated your blog or website and now you are waiting and waiting and waiting for the new information to appear in the search engine. Well, keep on waiting… or take action.

You can quickly and easily tell the search engines that you have made an update and that they should send their spiders out to re-crawl your site by Pinging.

There are several free services that will let you ping multiple major search sites all at one time.

Before I let you know where to go, I have one warning. Do not spam-ping. Do not ping the search engines every ½ hour. Do not ping the search engines if you do not have any new content. This will not improve your ranking and may just get you banned from the search engine altogether.

Now that you have the rules, here is what to do.

If your are either lazy or really busy, then go to Feedburner.com and burn your RSS feed to Feedburner. Once you are set up, activate their automatic pinging tool. This will automatically ping some of the biggest search engines every time you update content in your RSS feed.

If you feel Feedburner does not ping enough sites, or you like to do things the hard way, you can use these free manual services:

Ping Bloggers - http://bloggers.com/
Ping-O-Matic - http://pingomatic.com/
Pingoat - http://www.pingoat.com/
King Ping - http://www.kping.com/

Be careful, if using more than one ping tool because many of them ping the same search engines and you could end up spam-pinging by accident.

Stop waiting around for the search engines to find you, tell them you are here, you are fresh, you are up-to-date, and you are great.

Principles Of Blog SEO

By Craig Andrews

Whether you are writing a blog for the joy of having a large readership or you are looking to earn income from your blog neither will be possible if you have not maximized your blog's search engine optimization (SEO) potential. This is because without proper SEO a blog will be doomed to float in the netherworld of various blogs and websites that receive virtually no hits.

For those not familiar with what blog SEO refers to it means the maximization of a blog's positioning in the search engines. For example, if you were to type the words "horror movie blog" in Google's search engine and hit enter you would see a listing of thousands of horror movie blogs ranked in terms of their popularity at a quantity of ten listings per page. In general, most people do not look past the first 30 entries on the search engine rankings so if your horror movie blog is hovering at 4,445 you probably are not going to receive much traffic. No worries, however, because there are a number of ways in which you can effectively increase your blog's search engine rankings.

The most obvious way of improving your search engine ranking involves link building. That is, you need to greatly expand the number of link that point back to your blog throughout the Internet. This can include trading links, purchasing links, submitting links to website directories, or even leaving links as part of your signature on forums and message boards. In time, if you amass enough links then your placement will continue to rise in the rankings. But, this can all be undone if you select the wrong link name.

For example, if you horror movie blog is entitled "Dave's Mummy Movie Fan Blog" you don't want to name your link "Dave's Mummy Movie Fan Blog" because those are not the common words that people will type when they are looking for horror movie blogs! Instead, you need to name your link "horror movie reviews" or "top horror movies" or simply "horror movie blog". In other words, you want to name your blog's link after the common items that people will plug into a search engine.

Remember, without solid search engine optimization a blog really is not going to gain a lot of traffic. So, build links, build a lot of them, and use a reliable link name. This is a simple plan but it is enormously effective.

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