Thursday, February 9, 2012

How To Essential Skills for the Online Writing Professional?

If you want to have a successful career in online writing, it pays to develop the right set of skills. First of all, it is important to have excellent writing ability, but you will need more than that. You will have to know something about search engine optimization, or SEO for short, because many clients are looking for writers with knowledge of SEO. You may also have to learn social media writing skills.

Online Writing Style Tips

The first thing you need to do is to master the art of online writing. That means that first of all, you need to know your audience. Internet readers tend to scan a lot of information quickly. If they see your article, they need to get the gist of it in a few lines. A descriptive headline will help a lot. In fact, you should write like a journalist, emphasizing the who, what, when, where, and why.

Know the Importance of SEO

The next step is to study SEO strategy and tactics. You will be able to get online writing jobs even without knowing SEO, but knowledge of it will bring you greater opportunities. Most clients are looking for content that will drive up the web traffic to their sites, so they apply SEO techniques when generating their content. If they decide to hire a writer, they will prefer someone who is already familiar with the requirements of working within an SEO framework. So if you have knowledge of SEO, your client will have more confidence in your ability to produce the type of content that is demanded.

Learn These SEO Writing Tips

Search engine optimization is a vast subject, and one that is not limited to writing, but you can get started with these few tips. First, you need to understand how to use keywords. These are words or phrases that people type into search engines to find articles. You want them to find your article, so you must think of the keywords they will use to find it. Be sure to use the keywords in the title of your article. You should also use them in the text, but avoid loading the article with keywords. Instead, limit each keyword to no more than 5% of the total word count.

Develop Your Social Media Writing Skills

There is a lot of demand in the online writing marketplace for SEO experts, but there is also a growing demand for professionals with social media writing skills. Companies are relying more and more on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to promote and market their brands and products. So companies are in need of skilled writers who have a feel for social media. Because your audience must choose to follow you, you need to be able to engage readers and build relationships through your writing. You have to be able adapt your writing to fit within the parameters of the network you are using. Learn to do that, and your online writing skills may soon be in high demand.

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