Freelance Writers: How to "Keyword" Your Site to Get Found Online

I know, I know, more tech stuff . . . BUT, I beg you not to tune out, as this is critical to the success of your website (which you do have, or are planning to get, right?). I hate all this techiness too, but the thing is, once you learn a little about it and apply a few simple principles, it can work wonders for your online sales (eg, acquiring clients, selling products, etc.).

So, on to today's topic which is, how do you know which labels/keywords to use.

If you're stumped for which phrases people who might be interested in your freelance writing services might use to find you online, following are a couple of tools you can use to help you figure it out - machines (or, at least software programs) really do think!

Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool: This can be found at here.

You simply type in the term you want suggestions for, and it will give you: i) Related searches that include your term; and ii) the estimated number of times that term was searched on last month.

Google Keyword Tool: This can be found at here.

I like this one better because it lists so many more phrases from which to choose. When I typed in "freelance writing" for example, it returned 175 keyword phrases I could choose from.

And, Google shows you a stat called "Advertiser Competition," which is the statistics showing the relative amount of advertisers bidding on that keyword. It also offers a few other stats that help you in deciding which keywords to choose. No wonder they're the search engine of choice.

In my opinion, this is the only keyword search tool you will ever need.

So, now that you know where to find keywords/labels/tags, what should you do with them?

Well, as mentioned in yesterday's post, you can start by using them to label your blog posts more concisely.

Other uses:

Formulate articles: if you use article marketing (and if you don't have a lot of money you should), pay attention to the key word list and try to naturally weave some of the most popular phrases into you article.