This article first appeared in the Canadian Association of Journalists Winter 2010 magazine. I love this association, and it was a real pleasure to provide them with a SEO How-to-Guide:)

Journalists find themselves having to focus more and more on search engine optimization (SEO). As more publications shift their attention to establishing a stronger online presence, SEO is an intrinsic tool to increasing traffic and, most importantly, building an online community. The following are SEO tips and tricks that the OurBlook.com team has created for the journalism classes taking part in their University Partnership Program. (www.ourblook.com/ University-Blooks.html)

Identify your Keywords

Before you begin writing, identify the keywords that you would like to optimize in your article. In other words, identify words or phrases that give your article a high ranking in a search-engine query. A good technique is to imagine that you are an Internet user searching for the information your article provides. What search terms or phrases would you input in your search engine query that could potentially allow you to discover the article? Alternatively, as a writer, you should also ask 'what question or query does my article best address?'

For example, if you are writing an article on affordable restaurants in New York, you might pick "cheap restaurants in New York," or "New York cheap eats." Additionally, you could zone in on the specifics of the article by focusing on the particular neighborhood your article covers. As a result, you might pick "cheap restaurants in Union Square" or "Union Square cheap eats." Generally speaking, specific references produce the best results.

There are various tools available to help you with this process, such as Google Keyword Selector.(adwords.google.com/select/ KeywordToolExternal). The tool helps you brainstorm by suggesting alternatives keywords, and provides you with the search traffic for each keyword as well.

Depending on your SEO strategy, there are two routes you can take. You can either try to get a piece of the pie by focusing on more competitive words (your chances of being listed in the first page results might be low but you can benefit from the residual traffic that might venture to the second page or beyond), or you could aim to be one of the first websites listed for less competitive keywords. Essentially, competitive words are those that have a high percent of Internet traffic associated with them, and thus are in high demand.

Repeat and Include your Keywords in Various "Key" Places

Search engines are not human beings. They read articles differently. Their spiders are programmed to look in specific areas to get an understanding of what a piece of content is about. Targeted keywords should be included in titles, bolded and/or italicized in the text, and linked to related articles.

Essentially, by giving this type of "special treatment" to keywords, you are basically telling search engines that these keywords are important and reflect the main theme of your article. To see an example, just pick the first website that appears in any search result. For example, Google SEO, and one of the first websites that appears is the Wikipedia entry. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Search_engine_optimization) This is not surprising, since wiki articles usually have a lot of good content and links to various related areas. Notice that it's not only the search term SEO that is linked, but words that can be considered related such as meta tags and spider.

Keyword density is also extremely important. Your keywords should appear at the beginning and end of an article, as well as in various paragraphs in between. However, beware of overstuffing your article with keywords, as this will be seen as spam. As a journalist, I really don't think you'll be at risk of creating a "spam article" because your number one priority is to create a piece of good content. Usually, bad marketers are the number one culprits in this area because their number one priority is to have people land on a particular page, and thus they pay little attention to the actual content.

Pay Attention to Meta Tags

Meta tags can be regarded as private notes that you leave for search engines. It is your opportunity to tell them what you think your article is about. Your targeted keywords should be included in the meta title and meta description (both of which will also be seen by the public, as it is the text that appears in search results), and the meta keywords. However, please note that only lowercases should be used in the meta keywords section.

Your Code Matters

Besides the formatting you can give certain keywords (bold, italics), your code can either make or break your SEO efforts. First, titles should always be given a <h1> tag. Second, the URL of the page should include the targeted keywords. Finally, and most importantly, your pages should have a high context-to-code ratio, or a high signal-tonoise ratio. This is a fancy to way to say that your page should have more text than code. While other factors contribute to determining how well your page will rank in search engine results, such as the authority of a website, the aforementioned tips will provide you with a great start. The most important rule to remember, however, is that content is king. Great content will be shared by Internet users and allow you to attract and cultivate a vibrant online community.

A Concrete Example

SEO is sometimes best learned 'in action' through an example. As such, I will analyze the following article, geology.com/articles/ tsunami-geology.shtml, which appears in the first page of the Google organic search result for the query, "what causes a tsunami." Keep in mind that the article may not utilize all the SEO techniques mentioned above – and that's okay because not all websites are the same. Google's algorithm uses different factors to determine the weight of an article —some which as a writer you can't control —such as the infrastructure of the site. Additionally, while it is important to implement SEO techniques, the most important thing is to create good, informative copy. That's what brings people to a website.

The Back End

The first thing I notice is that the word "geology" is part of the URL . This is a good start. Google likes to see words that relate contextually to the particular phrase or word you are querying. Additionally, the name of the document containing the article is tsunami-geology.shtml. Notice that this is the first mention of the word tsunami.

I also notice the website has several characteristics that Google likes: it was born on January 28, 1998, and thus is considered old; and it has a page rank of 6 and thus considered an authority website. As a writer, there is little you can do about this.

The next step is to view the page source or code (obtained by going to the "view" section on the menu, and selecting the "source" option). I notice the following meta tags:

<META name="description" content="What Causes a Tsunami - by Geology.com">

<META name="keywords" content="tsunami causes facts geology">

Additionally, the meta title of the page (the name that appears on the top of the browser), is "What Causes a Tsunami?— Tsunami Geology—GEOLOGY.COM"

Notice that my entire query "what causes a tsunami" is in the meta title as well as the meta description. Additionally, the keywords "tsunami" and "causes" are listed in the meta keywords tag.

The Front End

Now, let's analyze the actual text you can see on the page. The first thing I notice is that the tile of the article is "Tsunami Geology —What Causes a Tsunami?," and is in a H1 tag. The H1 tag is used to tell Google that these are the most important keywords in your article, and thus reflect the main idea or summary. Notice that in the title, the word tsunami is mentioned twice, and that the query phrase, what causes a tsunami, is mentioned once.

Additionally, the author has created subtitles, tagged in H2, which also contain the keyword tsunami. For example: 'Subduction Zones are Potential Tsunami Locations' or 'Earthquake Causes Tsunami.'

The paragraph text itself has the mention of the word tsunami several times, the mention of the phrase "What causes a tsunami" once, and the mention of contextually related words and phrases such as seismic energy and earthquake.

The Results

In total, the keywords most repeated on the page are tsunami (18 times), geology (10 times), plate (10 times), ocean (9 times), tsunamis (8 times), and causes (7 times). The phrase 'what causes a tsunami" is mentioned 6 times. While the page lacks a good, high context-to-code ration, ie, there is more code than text on the page, I imagine that this overlooked because of the age and authority of the site

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