Hubber Advice: Keywords and Competition

Are you a person looking for advice on writing online articles? If so, I have some of the best advice you may ever read. This advice will cover different areas of writing. I am going to cover search engine optimization (SEO), links and cross-linking, followers, topics for writing, and making money from Hubpages. All of which are covered in different hubs to help keep the information from becoming too overwhelming.

Why should you listen to me? Because I am giving advice that makes sense on things that I know about. This hub will be aimed at helping new Hubbers make their way into part of the Hubpages population. I want to be honest with you up front so that you do not get your hopes set too high and quit. I want new writers to stick with it and accomplish something - something more than adding a link to one or two of my hubs.

Admittedly, I am somewhat new to Hubpages. At the time of writing this hub, I have been active for roughly eight of the ten months I have been a member of Hubpages. I am starting to come full circle and seeing the cycle of life at Hubpages. I am seeing things repeated, I repeated some of them myself when I was new. I hope this hub helps you learn a thing or two.

With online writing you will see a lot of people talking about Search Engine Optimization or SEO. This is simply optimizing your site and/or article for the search engines to see and rank high. This includes using specific keywords, placement of the keywords throughout the article, who and how many are linking to your article, and everything else, down to how the coding is written and what elements or tags contain what information.

Keywords are very important when it comes to online writing. You might not give a darn about what keywords the search engines decide represent your page and that is fine. But if you are here to make money as efficiently as possible, you will want to know how to use keywords to bring higher paying advertisements to your page(s).

If you check out Adword by Google, you can easily see what the advertisers are paying for their ads to show when these keywords are used. These are averages for the differing prices of the ad placement. Find a keyword(s) that you can use comfortably and not make it sound forced or repetitious. The main focus when looking to write with a keyword or words is to make sure you are knowledgeable about your topic, you are being original, and offering something that is going to help your reader. If you are helping people obtain the service(s) and/or information that they need - you will be a success. There are six images in pairs of two. The first image is the keyword string.

A keyword string is a string of words in the order that you will be using them. When using Adword it will tell you how much the click is charging the advertiser, on average. It tells how many people search for that exact term as well. This is more important to the entity paying for the advertisement. Next go to Google and type in the exact keyword(s) you are going to use in the order you are targeting them. This will show you the results of how many pages are targeting these same keywords. Also, if there are the advertisements at the top of the page or on the side of the page then the competition for these keyword by advertisers themselves is pretty good. Don't forget, they pay for those spots.

Even the placement of keyword(s) and the display tags of keywords is important. It is assumed that the placement of these words in the title or as headers means more to search engines. If the keyword(s) is at the beginning of the title it means more than if the keywords are at the end. If keywords are in bold then they mean more than if they are regular font. Every little thing adds to the importance of the keyword for driving ads to your page.

I do not think about all this too much though. I do try to make make the keywords prominent without being annoying by using them too often. If you are making a statement with the keywords emphasizing something, put them in bold or italicize them. Make clear statements using every method possible to prioritize your keyword or keywords and you will usually be okay. The search engines do look for spam and if the keyword(s) are used more than around 3-4% then it does dock your rating.

Just remember you want people to know what you are talking. Remember you can reiterate something a couple times in different ways, to remember something a person generally needs to read or hear something a couple times before remembering it. Keywords are like that, repeat them so people and search engines remember them. Mention them upfront so that they know they are important and if it makes sense put them in bold or italics so that they know they need to pay attention. If you start to get distracted and use other keywords unintentionally; then the search engines will check these keywords out too and you might draw money away from your page by putting other ads that you did not intend to be placed.