It does that. And more.

Why blogging has gotten so popular not just to those who can write but to everybody who has the capability to set up his own blog, one wouldn’t have to think hard for the reason.

The internet has made it possible and quite very easy for every “online” human being to reach out, shout, make a stand and share his mind without even having to leave his seat. And this is what blogging offers that we simply find hard to resist.

If blogging is this accessible to many, then those who can really put interesting things and write remarkable compositions should not be left behind on this spectacle. For writers, blogging can be a very engaging opportunity to showcase talent, writings, and let others read and comment on their work.

Who Reads a Blog Anyway?

Setting up your blog may be not as hard, since there are various instructions, how-to-guides and even step-by-step ways to customize a header or get funky fonts and templates but for those who are trying to setup their blog for the very first time, you may be wondering if there are really other people out there who would care to read your blog.

Searching for answers in Google may give you a bunch of technical ways and explanations on how your blog post ends to other people’s laptop or PC. You may be overwhelmed about this, since all that you wanted is to write and have others give opinion about what they think about your writing.

But what if you have created this wonderful post you’ve worked for several hours, posted it on your blog and nobody seem to care anyway?

You shouldn’t find this intimidating. The internet does not only make you The Writer, instead, it also allows you to explore on other areas of the web. Blogging allows you to learn how you can market your work, get readers and immerse yourself to the unbounded community lying beneath the network mesh of the cyberspace.

Your Masterpiece, Search Engine (SEO) and Marketing

These three have something in common. And that is YOU. With blogging, you are to touch all of these areas and you will be amazed on the list of things you can do once you apply all these three factors (writing, search engine optimization or SEO and marketing) on your blog.

These 3 main factors cannot be attained overnight but starting to get an idea on what online marketing and search engine optimization is, will be a very wise start.

God bless and welcome to the wonderful, crazy, intriguing and sometimes overwhelming world of blogging!

To learn more about how to get online exposure through search engine optimization, feel free to read my very first post, A Cyber Journey.

Writing for search engines simply put, means writing online. If you want to set up your own blog, or do freelance writing work online or you want to get an idea on how writing online differs from regular writing stints we do “offline,” here are some basic things you need to know about seo writing:

1. The Journalistic Style vs SEO Style

In news writing, you are required to have a certain kind of writing technique to formulate catchy titles and appealing sentences and capture your readers with your words or otherwise lose them in 5 seconds. But in internet marketing, you need FIRST to be FOUND.

Since the world wide web is composed of this vast cyberspace full of billions of webpages (that’s as far as I can count, but probably there’s more), your copy can easily be dumped and lost under its webby spaces and you will never be found. Ever again. Poor you.

But by simply “optimizing” your copy or your contents, spiders crawling around the web will find ya.

2. Optimizing copy

When writing for search engines, we need to maximize or get the most out of our copies. Let those spiders feed on your content and you’ll be happy. I’m actually telling you there are spiders and you need not be afraid of them.

In tech terms, they are called bots and they are exactly like spiders that crawl from one webpage to another and feast on billions of information they save in what they call data centers. Imagine like a lab and a highly enclosed facility hidden in an unidentified location so powerful and huge. Where people look so happy and they are all smiling because they work in Google. Yep.

Of course, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines have their own datacenters and set of terms they use. It’s GoogleBot for Google, Yahoo Slurp for Yahoo and MSNBot for MSN.

When writing for search engines, you are actually hoping that these bots or spiders will come and visit you and crawl your contents, not just once, but in a regular basis.

Optimizing your copies is the first thing you need to do, to make sure they’ll drop a visit. If they give you a visit, hola, YOU ARE FOUND. Finally.

3. Why Keywords are Important

When searching online, we usually go to a search engine, type in terms, phrases or keywords we think are relevant to what we are looking for and hit enter. Let’s say we use Google. I typed in, “seo hybrid” and hit search.

In the result, I am placed in the number two position. The result after every search is called, SERP or Search Engine Results Pages. And position of results is usually called search rankings.

Any idea why I’m on number two?

It’s because I used the keyword “seo hybrid” as the title of my blog. And GoogleBots think that the second most relevant to the “seo hybrid” keyword is my site, which is really what we are looking for here, and Google gave us the right information.

Why I’m not number one? That requires some other explanation but for now, I’d say, yey! I was found. =)

So simply put, if we placed keywords on the title, heading, subheadings of our webpage or copy, the spiders or bots will usually find us by those keywords.

Again to make it short, writing for search engines is based on targetted keywords, NOT necessarily UN-CATCHY titles but instead of writing “Movie Star to Speak Up in TV Show” it will be better to write Tom Cruise to Speak Up in Oprah, the exact keyword, than putting a vague description.

It’s OK if you prefer it that way, but optimizing copies will definitely make it easier for you to have readers drop by your site, because Google finds you relevant to show your webpage to searching users.

4. Keyword Placement

If spiders or bots finds you through keywords, why not place all the keywords you’d like to target on your entire copy? Not so good idea. Thousands of years ago, the emperor of Googleville found out that some webpages they crawl are only a bunch of spammers filling their content with keywords, over and over again. The Google emperor got so angry ang proceeded to create the “Google Algorithm.”

The Google Algorithm can’t be fooled. It won’t eat spam so spammers had to devise some other ways. The war is still on though.

So as not to be seen as a spammer, better place your keywords to the right places… (where it makes sense).

Place terms or keyword you’d like to target in the title of your copy, in the first sentence of your paragraph, you can italicize or bold it once or twice within your copy, and/ or add to your bulleted lists.

This way you are making a point, that your copy is about that “term” or “keyword.” I suggest you use your keywords 3 to 4 times within your entire copy, placing it to relevant places. If you used your keyword 8 times or more, your copy may be tagged as “spammy.”

5. Focus on Readability

It may be hard at first to write copies focusing on keywords but it’s actually easier. Writing online is way easier than news writing or writing feature articles on magazines etc. But it doesn’t mean you’ll write vague, unclear copies with keywords placed all over the right places.

Write for the human eye, that is still the major factor, once your copy is found by visitors, it’s your writing that will make them want to stay on your page or click back.

If you find it hard to combine readability and keyword insertions to your entire copy, ignore the keywords, write for people and then just go back to place the keywords in the right places.