Search engine optimisation, also known as SEO, can provide a solution to these issues as it attempts to increase the amount of people viewing a particular website or article by improving its ranking in search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. With this in mind, considering SEO when writing for the internet could prove useful in ensuring your articles get the readership they deserve.



Background

We now live in what has been coined a ?search culture? where the majority of the UK population will use search engines to find articles, locate information and read the news. Only last year The New York Times reported that it receives more readers coming to their articles through search engines and links on other websites than readers that go directly to the newspaper's homepage. With this in mind, if your articles are not optimised to be found by a search engine, you may be greatly reducing your readership.

The Challenge

Action point1: To ensure your article appears in the results, think about what keywords your readers would type into the search box and include them in your writing.

Why? Search engines rank their results according to how relevant the content of the websites or articles are to what a user has typed into the search box. To do this, a search engine spider will crawl an article or website to find keywords that best match the search query. If your article does not contain these particular keywords it will not be listed in the search results.

The Wall Street Journal's website posted an article about Green Beans Coffee, a company serving overseas U.S. military bases, opening its first caf? in the U.S.

A reader looking for this information might type ?Green Beans?, ?Coffee?, ?U.S. military?, ?bases? or ?soldiers? into a search engine, so these words should have been included in the article.

However, rather than including relevant keywords, the headline read ?Green Beans Comes Marching Home?. The words in the headline do not match what a user would have typed into the search box, so the article did not appear in the listings.

If the headline and the body text had consisted of relevant keywords, the piece would have appeared in the search results and possibly delivered a greater number of readers.

Action point 2: Use synonyms

Action point 3: Most repeated keyword on page = primary page theme

Action point 4: Your targeted keywords should be present in the first and last paragraphs

Despite the clear importance of search engine optimisation when writing for the web, the techniques are by no means intended to be used instead of professional journalism.

However, it is evidently the case that many quality articles remain unseen by potential readers purely because their content has not been optimised for people searching the internet.

SEO can prove invaluable in directing traffic towards your articles and making sure that your pieces are read instead of a rival's. Search engine optimisation is a valuable tool for any journalist and should go hand-in-hand with expert writing.