Thursday 30 December 2010

Rissa Fights Leukemia - Writers Helping Writers

A colleague of mine was diagnosed this week with Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, otherwise known as ALL. My friends - my writing family, really - at the Yahoo! Content Network have mobilized to help raise funds for Rissa Watkins' medical bills and living expenses. Rissa has not been able to work while doctors were trying to sort out what was wrong, and now she's been diagnosed she faces a period of difficult treatments and astronomical bills that her insurance will only partially cover.


My dear friend Marie Anne St. Jean is donating her performance pay for this month towards Rissa's medical and living expenses. You can help Marie Anne raise a little extra money to help Rissa and her family by reading Marie Anne's articles at Y!CN over the next two days. Here's the beginning of one of her articles about search engine optimization, to get you started. Please click to read more, because when you read Marie Anne's content at Y!CN you'll help her earn more performance pay. This is something you can do for freelance writers anytime, but it's most especially appreciated at a time like this!
Article writers know the importance of keywords in helping to get their work near the top of a search engine's ranking, but formatting also plays a key part in SEO - that's where the O in Search Engine Optimization comes in. When crawling content on the internet, search engines will pick up on techniques used to format the words on a page that give them more emphasis than straight text.

How words are displayed on a page make a difference in the way the search engines read them, not unlike the eyes of your readers. If you want to make sure your audience doesn't miss certain points in your print article, you might use bold or italics to make them stand out. Search engines need to know what's important too, so make it clear by using basic html tags to emphasize keywords and phrases.

Fortunately, some of the natural formatting we apply to make our pages easier for the human eye to process, are also techniques utilized in SEO.
Read more of Marie Anne's article, "Simple Techniques Put the Optimization in SEO," at the Yahoo! Content Network. If you happen to see anything else that Marie Anne has written and you want to read it, please do that too! Any of Marie Anne's content that you read before New Year's Day will go towards the bonus she is donating to Rissa.

2 comments:

Marie Anne said...

Kyla, thank you for helping to spread the word about my goal. I'm honored to be a member of the freelance community that is banding together in this show of support for one of our own.

Rissa WILL kick this, and we can help her stay afloat while she does.

Anonymous said...

Kyla,

I am just now seeing this and wanted to say thank you! I have been blessed by the support of the writing community.

Thank you so much for your post!

Rissa