Citing Sources and Doing Online Research for Freelance Writing to Gain Search Engine Traffic

How to Avoid Plagiarism and Adhere to Journalistic Ethics

If there's one thing most online freelance writers forget to do, it's citing sources and doing proper research online to give their ideas credibility and strength. Even worse, the few who remember to do it still do not cite sources correctly. Journalistic ethics are universal and all academic writers are familiar with logos, the cornerstone of all writing rhetoric. Logic, reason, and evidence will drive more internet traffic to your site and you will gain more page views as an online freelance writer.

Citing sources online is much easier than you think because it only takes a few times of practice to perfect it. The internet is a huge place with many informative articles but none of those are credible if they don't have expert based knowledge or research conducted by trusted organizations. If you write about new studies in medicine or discoveries in physics, citing sources is not just important.

It is required.

Why Citing Sources is Important and How it Increases Your Internet Search Traffic

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are required for your articles to achieve a high spot in search engines such as Google. Specifically, Google PageRank is an attribute given to every page to determine its overall importance on the internet.

One way to significantly increase your Google PageRank is to have relevant links in your article to the topics you are addressing. When researching online, it is best to mention websites that primarily use the .edu, .org, and .gov url extensions because non-profit educational sources usually rank the highest. High quality links used in the right places is more useful than you can imagine and is a proven method of increasing the popularity of your PageRank.

Avoiding Plagiarism and Maintaining Credibility