Writing a story is fairly simple. Pick a topic, determine a theme and give it some sort of plot. Most online writers don’t have to worry too much about word count, keywords and tags. Well, unless you want everyone to find it, because ‘though content rules, if no one can find it, no one can read it.

Enter Search Engine Optimization, that voodoo sounding term that deals with things like keyword density, tagging, and descriptions. The writer’s world just became a lot more complex. Writing SEO-friendly copy isn’t extremely tough, just time consuming. Most writers scoff at the very idea, as they feel it ruins the flow of their story and also takes away from the artistic element.

Well, good luck to those guys. The writers that get it seem to be thriving, and considering I make part of the rent money writing for various client blogs, I want to get it, too. Using plugins like All-in-One SEO was helpful, as well as including calls to action and sharing buttons on each page and post. But that wasn’t enough. No matter how well I chose my keywords, most of my blogs, including this one, never got much traffic except from my 3-5 times daily tweeting/updating.

Either I sucked at SEO (somewhat likely), was lazy (not very likely) or just wasn’t doing it quite right (most likely). Either I needed to miraculous get better at copywriting with SEO in mind (not something I wanted) or I needed a better way to grade SEO after the post was written.

Enter ScribeSEO. ScribeSEO is a subscription service that allows me, either inside WordPress as a plugin or outside on the ScribeSEO website, grade 10 SEO elements that Brian Clark of Copyblogger has deemed necessary for posts. In reality, it made what many smart writers already do and automated it. No, it didn’t write posts for me and no, it didn’t pick keywords, it only suggested them. No amount of bad writing will be saved by using ScribeSEO.

But ScribeSEO can make you more visible. My home pages now all receive consistent traffic that’s increased weekly since I bought the subscription. So try it.

Need more details? Here’s the booklet. (PDF link)

(The ScribeSEO icon in my right column is an affiliate link. I believe I get something if you click through and then sign up, but I have idea what. Hopefully a lot of money. So go click on it. Seriously. No? CLICK HERE.