Content not working hard enough on your website? Not getting enough visitors? No comments? No Facebook Likes or Re-tweets? Fortunately, it's never too late to optimise your website.
Don't worry if you've already created content without giving a decent nod to search engine optimization (SEO).
Search engine spiders/bots are continually visiting and revisiting websites.
You can catch up.
We all want more traffic.
We all want more sales, ad-clicks, opt-ins and views (with less 'bounce').
It's never too late to edit existing web pages so that they perform better in the search engines.
You know the drill.
Deploy relevant (and accessible) keywords in strategic places in your copy - the title, the main copy, image captions and sub-headings.
It doesn't take an SEO expert to make effective SEO tweaks.
And when you are using images, audio and video, don't forget to use keywords where you can.
Start with the filenames and add any META data where possible.
YouTube, for example, allows you to add a description of your video (a great place for the keyword and your website URL) plus related keyword tags.
Keywords are useful in all content, not just articles.
They can be beacons within the descriptions of podcasts and videos, tweets, press releases, article submissions, presentations, e-courses and ebooks.
Like it or not, SEO is an important part of modern web writing.
But...
It's important not to get obsessed with SEO.
I've seen good articles with little or no optimisation go viral and articles that have been methodically and logically keyworded completely fail to launch.
The key is finding a good balance.
It's been argued that SEO is ruining writing on the Internet, as pages are tweaked to appeal to search engines first and real people second.
Some sites focus more on getting links, attracting re-tweets, displaying ads and stating keywords over and over (and over) again than they do on creating good content.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the wrong way round.
But if you're writing good content, original content and valuable content, then the chances are that you're also going to mention related words and phrases in your copy.
So if you're talking about 'making your own wine', you'll probably also cover 'brewing', 'wine glasses', 'bottles', 'grapes', 'white wine', 'red wine' and so on.
The process is often automatic.
So your SEO is automatic.
Ultimately, the idea is to rank for as many keywords as possible and pull in a variety of searches.
One of my own websites drew in traffic via 43,115 different keywords and keyphrases during March/April 2011.