What is SEO, anyway?
Let's learn a new skill
Hi! Today we’re talking about SEO. Do you need to know it? Should you learn it? Also uhhh what even is it? To give us some insight, I’ve invited good friend of FWT Rae Witte to answer those questions and more. Take it away Rae!
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Writers can use their skills in a variety of ways to make a living. While Tim’s newsletter is primarily about journalistic freelancing, having a career as a freelancer can include other streams of income that also leverage your skills as a writer. SEO can be one of them.
Okay, so, what is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is a set of writing practices and techniques intended to improve the visibility of a website by achieving a higher ranking in search engine results. Yes, you read that correctly, it’s a set of practices with kind of arbitrarily measurable results, because the search engines are not working directly with the websites outside of buying ad space. There is not at all a tried and true, step-by-step process to be top ranked on Google. The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase the quantity and quality of organic (non-paid) traffic to the website from search engines.
Because search engines like Google use complex algorithms to determine the relevance of web pages in response to a user's search, SEO involves optimizing various elements of a website, including its content, structure, and HTML code, to make it more appealing to the algorithms. This includes keyword research, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, technical SEO, and user experience optimization.
Search engines’ mission is to deliver the best information for users’ queries, and while they keep how they do that very close to the chest, SEO strategy is often a big priority for media and other businesses’ websites alike.
SEO writing is largely focused on the content and keyword part of these strategies. Keyword research can start with a tool like Google Keyword Planner to find terms with high search volume and relevance. Consider what you’d enter in that little search box whenever you pull up Google and what you’re looking for. These are keywords.
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Once the keywords are identified, they should be incorporated not only into the fresh, trustworthy, well-written content on the website, but they need to be within headings, meta descriptions, URL tags and images tags and captions.
While site owners can’t always pinpoint what strategies are working best, a tool like Google Analytics offers the ability to track key metrics such as organic traffic, bounce rate, and keyword rankings and make adjustments to the strategy.
SEO is an ongoing strategy where it often feels like the goalposts are always moving, but it’s an awesome option for writing and using your brain in a slightly different way than journalism because the end goal is always traffic-attaining content that’s aligned with the brand or mission of the site. And, I think it can help broaden your view of how you execute your journalism writing. Traffic ultimately pays the bills.
Hubspot and Google for Small Business are two dependable places to stay up to date on SEO practices, and The Washington Post has a really in depth resource.
Oh, a few other things …
• I offer one-on-one coaching! Need help developing an idea or sharpening one you already have? Or want to talk about careers and building your freelance business? I gotchu! Book a one-on-one coaching session to talk about pitch reviews, story development, editing, and anything else you might need help with.
• I’m going to start doing Q&A posts in the newsletter to answer all of your questions, comments, and thoughts about freelancing and journalism in general. Drop any and all questions in the comments section below this post or email me at tim@freelancingwithtim.com, and I may feature it in a future newsletter. Let’s hear it!
• Friend of the FWT Mandy Hofmockel offers one of my favorite journalism newsletters: Journalism jobs and a photo of my dog. It’s a wonderfully comprehensive — and hand-built — listing of journalism jobs all over the country. If you’re in the market and looking, read and subscribe here!
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Bye ily!
Tim❤️