What is SEO, and How Can It Help Me Earn Money?

If you have your own website or work as an online content producer who earns money for page views, you understand that the money part is all about website traffic, or how many people visit and view the content (and, therefore, the ads). On some content production sites, writers can get some income from socializing with each other and earn money that way, but the real money is in outside traffic. There are already millions, if not billions, of internet users out there from whom you can draw views, if you know the secrets of SEO to increase your traffic.

Just What is SEO, Exactly?

SEO stands for "search engine optimization". It refers specifically to how easy your website is to find by using a search engine like Google or Bing. Search engine optimization relies on the use of various techniques, including the use of keywords, which are words that are likely to be entered into the search engine by the person who is looking for information. 

For example, a person who is planning to travel to Mexico for the first time and wants to make sure they book a decent hotel sight unseen may enter the following search criteria: "hotel reviews Guadalajara Mexico". If your website features reviews of hotels in Guadalajara, you will want to feature those keywords prominently enough for the search engine to bring your website up near the top of the search results.

How Does SEO Benefit Me?

As you can imagine, there are a lot of websites out there fighting for real estate on the search results pages. Some popular terms can bring up literally millions of hits on Google, and potential customers certainly won't waste their time checking more than the first page or two of results. The use of SEO practices can increase your visibility and thereby your traffic. Even your website's URL can influence how easily potential business can find you.

Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-100-us-dollar-banknotes-2068975/

Why You Should Never Trust Spell Check

I have a love/hate relationship with Spell Check. I love it because I'm a very good speller, but a horrible typist. Before the days of this brilliant invention, I would have to hunt and peck very slowly to make sure that everything came out correctly, having no instinctive feel for keyboarding, which was a frustrating damper on my creative flow, I'll tell ya. But now I can go hell-bent for leather (I don't even know what that means-did Judas Priest make that up?) and when I come up for air, all of my typos are helpfully underlined in red. 

But here's the hate part: Sometimes typos are still real words. If you leave an 'o' off of 'too', replace the 'c' in 'cough' with a 'd', or transpose the vowels in 'lion', your Spell Check is not going to see it as a mistake. Also, sometimes misspelled words are still real words. If you leave the 'u' out of fourth or have a homophonic brainlapse and write 'accept' when you meant 'except', who is Spell Check to kick about it? Nobody, that's who.

Here's one more reason not to trust it to do your proofreading for you: proper nouns and made-up words. When you know Spell Check won't recognize the spelling of a proper name (Smith, no problem; Nkwoze, problem) or a silly word you made up for 'flavor', it's easy to ignore the red underlines, but what if you still managed to misspell the thing? Mr. Nkwoze might feel slighted if he sees his name as Knowze and people think he's Beyonce's dad. (I know it's Knowles. Don't write in.) For example, I initially typed the non-standard 'brainlapse' as 'brianlapse'. If I had bypassed giving it a once-over simply because I knew Spell Check couldn't handle it, I might have left people with the impression that I would be a better writer but for lack of Brian. (I miss you, Brian! Call me!)

The moral of the story is: Spell Check is a tool, not a contractor. Before you send your creations out into the world, give them a good read or even have someone else read them (frequently we will miss our own mistakes because we already know what we're trying to say, but they will pop out at someone else). Heck, read 'em twice. It's called editing. I know some errors will still get through (I was aghast at seeing a typo in the title of a story I did that was featured on the front page of Yahoo, so I'm no stranger to public humiliation), but we do our best.

Free use image from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/keyboard-computer-keys-white-886462/