What is SEO/Search Engine Optimisation?

If you have a blog or website, you need to understand how to use SEO and how it can help you.

Simply put, SEO is how search engines like Google find out what a webpage is about.

They use algorithms to look up keywords and keyphrases on a page as well as related keywords and phrases to fully understand the content.

And it then matches it up with search terms that people are looking for.

So for instance, if someone is searching for "what is SEO" or "how to use SEO" I've used both these terms in the heading and the first sentence as well as this sentence.

I've also used related terms like Google, algorithms and keywords.

So it should be really easy for search engines to know what this page is about.

And that's all there basically is to it.

But you might be wondering, so what? How can SEO help you?

Well, there are 3 ways that I know of:

• It can get you more traffic to your website or blog.
• It can increase your income from PPC ads because they will be better matched to your content
• It can get you more backlinks if other blog owners are finding and linking to your content.

And backlinks from the high-traffic sites are gold because you can get far more traffic to your site from visitors to other sites seeing your link.

So if you want to do SEO right, find out what people are searching for and specifically what keywords and phrases they're using and include them in your content.

And the easiest way to do that is by using keyword research software.

One my favourites is Serpstat because it's easy to use and you can use it's free.

I can quickly find dozens of keywords and which other websites are competing for the exact same phrases as well as how many searches each word gets.

I can also do keyword analysis of my own websites.

Visit Serpstat and join for free.
https://bit.ly/2Il4JqD

What to do if an article editor buys your article but doesn't publish it.

This was an interesting question asked by a freelance writer: “Someone wants to buy reprint rights to my article…but the first buyer hasn’t yet published it!”

And it is such a legitimate dilemma but I'd never thought about it before.

What happened was that the writer had written an article and sold it to a magazine.

Months later, another magazine asked if they could buy the reprint rights to publish the article, but because the first magazine hadn't yet published it, she couldn't sell the reprint rights to anyone.

This is something I've never thought of before because I've sold a lot of articles and stories to magazines and they always tell me when they plan to publish it and they do.  But I have never stressed in a contract that they must publish it by a certain date. It's an open option I've always given them and trusted them to publish it when they said the would.

But this poor author did the same thing but because the magazine had bought the first publishing rights to her article, she couldn't use it again until they publish it.

I read about this at http://writersweekly.com/ask-the-expert/reprint-rights.

You can read about it there too and the solution, which is a warning to every writer who wants to get published in a magazine that they've never worked with before.

It's definitely food for thought.

How I Edit My Manuscripts

Books are the bread and butter of my writing income.

And as you know I'm currently working on my latest romance novel.

The manuscript is written and now I'm going through the second draft.

And it got me to thinking about how many people say that second draft is first draft minus 10%. In other words, the second draft should be a tightening up of the first draft and so take out whatever is unnecessary, which they always say is about 10% of what you've written.

And I used to believe that and so my second draft was always me looking for ways to cut words out.

Yet as the years progress I find more and more that my second draft equals my first drafts PLUS 30%. (my percentage may be wrong but I definitely add to my second draft, not take from it.)

That's because I find it easier to get the first draft written rather than getting it right. That has always been a favourite saying of mine (which I made up myself), "Don't get it right, get it written."

This is because my creativity flows better and my focus is razor-sharp if I'm writing without thinking about if it's right or not. I just need to get my book written. And most of the time, I find that even in parts of it where I think I've gone wrong, I haven't. On reading it through at second draft stage, I find it's fine.

And then comes the first edit which is where I read through my manuscript and, if it's fiction, I add more bits of detail such as what people are wearing or what they're eating, or I write more about their environment or I add more dialogue to conversations.

If I'm writing  non-fiction I go deeper into explanations of how or why to do things or talk more about how things came to be. Whatever it is, I always find more to add in the second draft.

That's not to say that I don't remove unnecessary things, because I do. But I still find more to add than to subtract.

And that's not a bad thing if it helps in the flow of creativity.

So ignore what anyone says about how to edit a book. Just do whatever makes your book the best it can be.

And enjoy writing that first draft because that's always the fun part.

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