Web writers, whether in business or for personal sites and blogs, can't just write well. They also have to write with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind, otherwise, it's a crap shoot whether anyone will ever find their prose, no matter how well crafted it is.
Freemium tool Inbound Writer (free to $19.95 per month), by eightfold logic, is an online service that gives you feedback on how well your content is optimized for search engines. WordPress.org users can find Inbound Writer as an available plug-in (see the demo video for a 50-second introduction), giving them SEO feedback from directly within the editor. If you want to use the tool for non-WordPress.org sites, you copy and paste any written material into an editor on InboundWriter.com and receive in return an overall score (1 to 100) as well as dynamic feedback about how and where to tweak your text so that it will rank higher with search engines. The result, hopefully, is that people searching and surfing the Web for the information you've provided will find it.
As a concept, Inbound Writer hits all the right marks. In terms of usability, the tool is close to being exceptional, but falters slightly in how it relies on the author to provide the "right" information (explained in more detail later). Now with the inclusion of a WordPress.org plug-in, which was notably missing from the initial release of the product, writers have SEO feedback incorporated directly into their writing processes. Multisite installations aren't supported just yet, although company reps say adding it is on their agenda. Inbound Writer offers a lot of guidance in an easy-to-use dashboard. Given a few more iterations, the program has the potential to spawn more useful apps, plug-ins, and other modular spinoffs that would really increase its value.
SEO Tips for Writers
Everyone who uses Inbound Writer, whether paid subscriber or free user, needs a log in to access the tool. With a free account, you can analyze up to eight documents per month in the online system. Paid subscribers get unlimited files.
Analyzing a document isn't quite as easy and copying and pasting it into a text editor. For Inbound Writer to gather relevant information about your content, it needs some assistance, a few key terms and related websites that help it figure out the purpose of your written piece. For example, if you've written a blog post about the 1990s television show Twin Peaks, you need to tell Inbound Writer that the post focuses on the show and the plot, as opposed to maybe the actors and history of the program. The way to provide this information is through Focus Terms, or words that describe your content, and Inbound Writer walks you through the steps and explains how terms will be used every time you create a new document.
Each new document needs three terms to start. Deciding what your terms will or should be largely affects Inbound Writer's assessment of your document, so it's very important to take your time and choose the terms carefully.
Similar to having relevant terms, knowing at least one website that has comparative content helps Inbound Writer give you more useful suggestions for tailoring your content. Again, Inbound Writer walks you through this stage. It's very simple and self-explanatory, although it does take a little time to make sure you're giving it sites that are appropriate.
Once you've created a document, you can't go back and change which sites you've told the system contain content that's similar to yours. In testing, I found it took me a few tries, maybe five or six documents, before I felt like I was capable of picking good sites for comparison.
Armed with this information, Inbound Writer looks across the Web, searching the sites you supplied as well as all the major ones, like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and so on, for relevant material. The system displays what it finds in a slightly busy dashboard, which also has an editor, where you can now copy and paste (or compose) your original text.
To the left of the editor on the InboundWriter site (it's to the right when using WordPress) is a meter than runs from one to 100, indicating your overall Inbound Writer score. A score between one and 50 appears in a red zone, meaning the content isn't well optimized for search engines. A score between 50 and 80 is yellow, or reasonably good. Scores above 80 are green, or very SEO friendly. If you're in the green, you probably don't need to tweak your text at all. Documents scoring in the red and yellow zones, however, need improvement, and Inbound Writer starts you off with a few suggestions listed directly below the meter.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/9r9KOXGVCo0/0,2817,2392483,00.asp
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