5 Quick SEO Tips to Help Freelancers Get Higher Search Engine Rankings
Posted August 12, 2010 in How-To, Tools/Resources
Search Engine Optimization is a long-term process that heavily involves on-page optimization, link building and other SEO techniques. Generally acquiring quality links is harder and more time-consuming compared to the on-page optimization. That’s why on-page optimization is a great white-hat way to boost your rankings in a short period of time.
In this post, we will review five quick & easy SEO tips that can help you improve the rankings of your website in the major Search Engines.
1. Optimize the Page Titles
Rewriting the non-optimized titles of a website is a very good technique to affect the search engine rankings and increase the click through rate in a short period of time. The page titles are HTML elements located in the HTML Header and they are very important both for the search engines and for the users.
Generally, page titles should be short (less than 64-70 characters), they should be descriptive and they must contain the main keywords of the page. At the same time, titles should be attractive to the user in order to increase the clicks that come from the search results.
So, if you want to boost your search engine traffic, make sure that your website contains pages with unique, attractive and descriptive titles.
2. Optimize the META-tags
The META-tags are HTML elements that are placed in the HTML Header and that contain info about the page. The three most popular metatags are the meta-description, the meta-keywords and the meta-robots.
Meta-description is one of the most important metatags in SEO since it usually appears as a snippet (brief description of the page) in the search results. Keep in mind that the meta-description elements should be short, generally less than 150 characters. Additionally, since they appear in the search results they should also be attractive and describe in the best possible way the content of the page. You can learn more about meta descriptions from Matt Cutts here
and here.
Meta-keywords is the second most popular metatag, but nowadays it does not have any significant value for SEO. Matt Cutts has made it clear in the past that Meta-keywords do not affect search rankings (check the video) and that webmasters should not spend any time on this.
Meta-robots is another popular metatag that affects the crawling of search engines. This element specifies whether the particular page should be indexed and whether the outgoing links should be followed. The default value is “index,follow” and my suggestion is not to change this value unless you know what you are doing.
So, in order to positively affect the search engine results make sure you spend time writing optimized meta-descriptions and ensure that you use the proper meta-robots values.
3. Work on Your Internal Linking
The internal linking is one of the most important factors that affect the SEO campaign. By internal linking, we refer to the way that the pages of the site link to each other. Generally, the main principle is to keep the important pages of a website as close as possible to the homepage. By linking directly to those pages from the main page you increase their pageviews and you pass to them valuable link juice (PageRank). Thus, if you want to boost the search engine rankings of a particular internal page of your website make sure you link directly from the pages that have high PageRank values and from the homepage.
4. Mind the Keyword Usage
One of the most important steps of SEO copywriting is creating a list with the main keywords that describe a page and with all the popular terms that the users could use to find the page in the search engines. After identifying the main terms, it is essential to select the most important ones and incorporate them in the title, meta-description, HTML headings and text of the page.
Keep in mind that relatively increased keyword density is a very common characteristic of optimized terms. Nevertheless, you should not focus only on keyword density, but rather on keyword rank, which measures how optimized is a particular term in one page. A good tool to measure the keyword rank of your keywords along with the relevance of your Title, Meta-description and HTML headers is the Keyword Analyzer tool. While analyzing your pages with it, make sure that the important keywords of your page have relatively increased keyword rank (within the green area) and the non-important ones have low (within the red).
Thus, in order to achieve better rankings, rewrite the text of your site and ensure that your pages are optimized for the correct terms (high keyword rank).
5. Use the Available Tools
Another quick and easy way to improve the search engine indexing and crawling is to use the available tools. Make sure that you use XML sitemaps in order to make it easier for search engines to find and index your pages, submit your site in the major search engines by using their Webmaster Tools and monitor frequently the results of your actions by using a Web Analytics service. Don’t forget that in order to improve the SEO status of your website you must use the right tools.
All the above techniques, along with effective link building, can help you achieve better results in the search engines and increase your organic traffic. Remember that the most important technique to achieve high ranking is to develop quality content for the users. After all content is the king.
Share Your Thoughts
Do you use SEO to drive content to your freelance business blog or freelance portfolio?
Share your answers in the comments.
Related posts:
- An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
- 13 Most Unusual Search Engines You Should Remember
- 10 SEO Techniques All Top Web Sites Should Use
- Over 50 Free SEO Tools and Much, Much More about Using SEO Techniques
- 3 Quick Recurring Revenue Tips for Freelance Designers
About the author: Vasilis Vryniotis is the co-founder of WebSEOAnalytics.com, an Internet Marketing Company that provides SEO Tools and Online Marketing Resources.
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116 Comments
saad irfan
August 12th, 2010 at 8:36 amthanks for the tips…
leaflette
August 12th, 2010 at 8:47 amthanks for the tips dude :)
Rhonda
August 12th, 2010 at 8:48 amGreat tips! And I agree that point number three is very important. Thanks for sharing.
Jordan Walker
August 12th, 2010 at 8:50 amyeah, search engine optimization is integral to web development.
Freelance FactFile
August 12th, 2010 at 9:22 amI use the All in One SEO Pack plug in for my blog which gives you separate fields for the page title, meta dsecription and key words. Worth installing.
Nabil El Alaoui Sossey
August 12th, 2010 at 11:09 amMETA-tags? Seriously.
tom
August 12th, 2010 at 11:27 amThe two main things is the title with you keywords in important to the left least to the right 6-8 max and then links to your website. You need to find the good search words that balance lots of searches to least competition..
link building services
August 12th, 2010 at 11:55 amIf you can follow all these steps, I’m sure that you will drive more traffic to your websites. Thanks for the useful info!
Alex
August 12th, 2010 at 12:38 pmThanks for the tips!
Personal Finance Articles
August 12th, 2010 at 4:55 pmThanks a lot for these important SEO tips. I always thought that the meta tags were not really considered. Then the other day I was told by a programmer that some search engines still use the meta tags. Also the keyword tool I suggest would be the one provided by SeoBook.
Anything Graphic
August 12th, 2010 at 8:47 pmThanks for the tips!
Tony Oravet
August 12th, 2010 at 9:40 pmGreat tips and great article! I agree that being able to change your page titles for each page is very important. The hard part is condensing them down to 70 characters.
Allen C
August 12th, 2010 at 11:12 pmMeta tags are pretty much irrelevant with Google though its rumored that other search engines still put a little weight into them.
aziz
August 12th, 2010 at 11:33 pmGreat tips..Thanks for sharing :)
TLC
August 12th, 2010 at 11:45 pmUgh. Call me a rebel, but I am sooooooo sick of hearing about all of this. Whatever happened to good writing that communicates clearly and effectively? Why can’t we just design the web pages, create the graphics and post the sites that most effectively sell our services? We’re so busy making Google happy that we can’t even do what’s best for ourselves and our clients to sell our goods and services.
Case in point: I went to yet another SEO session yesterday to listen to a man brag more about his clients than teach us SEO. At the end of the session, he talked about backlinks. One of his suggestions was to go to widgetbox.com and create a widget. Well, I did this several months ago so I could import my blog into my home page without having to update it manually. But since the Widget is programmed in Flash, Google doesn’t see any new text and therefore does not think my home page is updated very often. So now I have to delete a very effective, time-saving tool from my Web site to make Google happy. And I lose an SEO tool in the process. This is insanity!
I’m tired of having my Web site and my clients’ Web sites run by nerds in California who spend their days tweaking an algorithm. I’m tired of constantly adjusting my work to hit a massive, moving target. (FYI, there are more than 1,000 factors that are used to determine a search engine ranking.) And I’m tired of having to sacrifice quality, good grammar and effective communication for the great keyword gods.
bbriniotis
August 13th, 2010 at 1:26 am@Allen C: The META-description is extremely important for Search Engines (see Google Webmaster Videos). They use it as SERP snippet (the brief description that appears in the results). You are probably referring to the META-keywords that as I write in the article they are no longer used.
@TLC: SEO is done in parallel to the great content. Content is the king after all. This article does not suggest that you should sacrifice the quality of your Website. After all Google and Bing clearly suggest that the number 1 rule is to create quality websites. Having great content and great design do not interfere with SEO. Also I can’t be sure of what some other SEO professional proposed, but I suggest you to follow only white hat techniques. In our blog we write only about whitehat techniques and we strongly suggest that users should not follow blackhat methods. Nevertheless if you feel that Search Engines limit your work, think again. You can reach lots of users by optimizing your website and by ranking high on the Search Engines. Finally FYI Google states they use more than 200 factors.
Thanks everyone for your comments :)
SEO Services
August 13th, 2010 at 2:39 amNice Post
Thanks for sharing information about SEO Services.
Optimizing Title tags is one of the SEO industries tools needed to increase the search rankings of a website. All search engines place a high weightage on these tags as compared to the other aspects of the web page
rod rodriguez
August 13th, 2010 at 2:55 amThis are all brilliant points to ponder, I always thought that meta tags no longer has weight on search engine robots, although they are still important but not as important as content and key words inside the content. Maybe I should look this up again. Thanks for the post Vasilis!
$hekh@r
August 13th, 2010 at 3:07 amHelpful information.
Stephanie
August 13th, 2010 at 5:45 amTo be honest with you I don’t really focus so much on SEO when writing for my blog, for example, or writing articles other than making sure about the keywords and titles. What’s more, it distracts me from writing creatively and at some point sounds weird because of the appearance of the keyword or the number of times it has to be inserted into the content.
Apart from this, the one thing I don’t understand and don’t know how to do is point #2. *frustration*
Solomon
August 13th, 2010 at 6:11 amBeing tech-challenged, frankly, I too won’t worry much about this. As a writer, what I believe is: if the real personality of the brand of my client is unraveled I feel we’ve done a fine job for the money we’re paid.
I appreciate the post with very useful information for me !
Mary E. Ulrich
August 13th, 2010 at 10:19 amYou sound like you really know your stuff. I like that you broke down SEO essentials into three parts: Meta-description, meta-keywords, and meta-robots.
What I would love, is if you would take this same article and then dissect it using the tools you talked about. I need a tutorial with specific examples on everything you talked about. (Actually this could be 3 separate posts–one on each part).
I’m sure everything here is great stuff, but I’m only understanding part of it. Thanks.
raghavbaj
August 13th, 2010 at 11:41 amI really liked this
Sean
August 13th, 2010 at 6:02 pmGood tips on SEO. #3 Internal Linking is often the most overlooked of all the SEO tactics. Optimizing your internal links within the body copy of your web pages can have a significant boost to your keyword rankings. I recommend only adding a couple per page to keep things looking white hat. Keep up the great artilces.
SEO agency
August 14th, 2010 at 3:54 amI enjoyed reading your blog you have some really good tips I can use thanks
Harsh Agrawal
August 14th, 2010 at 9:38 amThat’s some simple and basic tips but still very useful. My take always interlink your post along with proper Anchor text…
harly
August 14th, 2010 at 11:43 amThanks for the nice tips.. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.you have done a great job.
hunting-info
August 14th, 2010 at 12:42 pmI will give it a try, Thanks!
Behzad
August 14th, 2010 at 10:19 pmMy site is in Flash, I do not follow much of what was said and yet rank top on 1st page of google for my town. SEO rules are never written in stone. Also If anyone thinks that they will get more business from SEO they are wrong. Although it helps, but most of my valued clients are from word of mouth and me contacting them directly.
Unfortunately SEO prospects brings with it a lot of tirekicers as well.
Hillman nurmansyah
August 16th, 2010 at 6:31 pmThanks for the tips,,,i really liked this.
seo services India
August 17th, 2010 at 6:49 amHiring a SEO company is the best option for website promotion. Indian SEO companies have the capability of handling large and small business houses SEO projects. They can also work at a time on many projects. They satisfy their client’s requirements and demands.
Chris Bowman
August 17th, 2010 at 10:12 amMETA Description tags also have no bearing on SEO performance. Google has stated this as well. Google does “use” them, but only for helping a Google search user scan the search results page. The description tags don’t actually help your website get to the top of Google.
Not to say you should not use them, since, once you get your website to the front page of a Google search result, you still need to persuade the user to click your link right?
META keywords such as Location seem like they would help in SEO performance, but I have not found anything to prove this fact.
Michael Bretherton
August 17th, 2010 at 8:06 pmGreat tips — thanks!
The Small Business Expert
August 18th, 2010 at 7:12 pmWow!! This could not be more relevant to SEO or more accurate. Thanks a ton for helping out all those looking to improve their organic search rankings.
Thanks and Regards,
The Small Business Expert for americabusinesssolutions.com
professional small business organic search engine optimization solutions
Jake Shepherd
August 20th, 2010 at 5:18 amI tend to agree with TLC to much time is spent trying to get sites ‘optimised’ and google is constantly changing the rules.
It seems now with google using your IP address to return more local results you can really struggle to compete with competition the other side of the country if your product is not location specific.
GVK
August 20th, 2010 at 2:52 pmReally I’m very happy to read this nice article, it’s good to SEO learners..
Thanks….:)
Miles
August 20th, 2010 at 5:04 pmLooking at it from that angle feels like its helped me. Thank you!
Website Builder
August 25th, 2010 at 2:20 amExcellent tips you have given to achieve a good position in Google. I have tried all your techniques and it shows great results, Now I am focusing on Internal linking that you have suggested in the post.
Veronica
August 26th, 2010 at 5:11 pmAlgo muy importante en SEO es la constancia en la aplicación de las técnicas. El reto es dar contenido de calidad al usuario y dar a Google contenido relevante rico en palabras clave, links, meta tags, etc. de tal modo que Google “entienda” tus páginas Web.
One very important thing in SEO is to be consistent in applying the whitehat techniques.
The challenge in SEO is to give quality content to users and to provide relevant content to Google using keywords, links, meta tags, etc. in order to Google can “understand” each page of your Web site.
miguelangelatwork
August 26th, 2010 at 6:18 pmIt seems that our goal is to find the delicate balance between what google wants and what us humans want to read… Creative writing is great, and it does take some creativity finding where to place those awkward combinations of keywords that we use in our every day google queries into our titles, meta’s and in our contents in general.
SEO Traffic Spider
August 27th, 2010 at 9:09 amI’m glad to have visited your blog and good to know you! I find it interesting and informative.
Juanjo
August 28th, 2010 at 7:07 pmthanks! good tip
CodeClouds
August 31st, 2010 at 6:18 amGood one!
hire website designer
September 14th, 2010 at 7:28 amnice post
Website Design SEO
September 15th, 2010 at 8:44 amGood information
thanks for Sharing
web connect
September 18th, 2010 at 6:22 amiT’s great post about seo although you have almost things but i want share one thing..
I recommend optimization of title for every page as seperate.Some time will give advantage for page optimization..By the way thanks for every information
Duncan
September 21st, 2010 at 2:52 amTwo brilliant tools that I use to help with our SEO and pageranking:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
http://websitegrader.com/
Found them very useful. Just thought I’d share. ;)
Spokane Website Design
September 23rd, 2010 at 5:49 pmOne note related to point one. Its best to have your keyword to the left of your title.
jeffrey78
October 8th, 2010 at 12:29 amGreat tips, thanks for sharing, I will try :)
Bambang Pamungkas
October 19th, 2010 at 12:10 pmI think I have to try these tips. This is really nice article! Thanks bro!
Justin
November 28th, 2010 at 2:44 amWonderful tips. Thanks mate.
Ashish Kumar
December 11th, 2010 at 12:29 amInformative article, great post!!!! Thanks for your suggestions.
Web Development
December 13th, 2010 at 7:11 am“Keep in mind that relatively increased keyword density is a very common characteristic of optimized terms.”
This is quite true but at the same time it is also a fact that in order to increase the density of the targeted keyword, people generally conclude with keyword stuffed pages and invites search engines to think in a negative manner about the website. We should take care of the readability and should maintain the charm of a web-page content. We should remember that the pages are meant for the viewers.
Search Engine Optimization New York
December 26th, 2010 at 9:10 pmThanks for the info. But even though Matt Cutts downgrades the importance of META keywords I still think that they should be used, properly. Some search engines still consider them important even though Google doesn’t. In addition the Meta description is important in many ways. One way is that without it Google pulls data from your site which may not be what you want pulled and may not make sense.
Thanks again.
Robbie Douglas
February 10th, 2011 at 7:22 amNice overview for beginners
Amazing things about asteroids
February 21st, 2011 at 4:54 amNumber 3 tip it’s a good tip for me! I needed this info!
Portland SEO
February 23rd, 2011 at 1:35 pmThanks for the tips. These are really helpful and informative.
placeitlocal
March 21st, 2011 at 11:53 amhttp://placeitlocal.com/ is About Giving Businesses and people the power to share and make the business world more open and connected in real time search. search engine optimization tips and its Local social network business,blogs, forums and online marketplace, rolled into one. you can find new products, announcements and stories. Read our blog at http://placeitlocal.com/blog
Chandra
April 2nd, 2011 at 3:30 amThanks for the nice tips..
andreea
July 2nd, 2011 at 8:39 pmpoint 3 is very valid
Myrna Fanatia
October 20th, 2011 at 1:48 amHi there, You’ve done an incredible job. I will certainly digg it and personally suggest to my friends. I am sure they will be benefited from this website.
John
November 26th, 2011 at 6:59 pmYes, mind the keyword usage. People will use their target keyword every other word sometimes which makes the text unreadable.
Seo Teknikleri
January 10th, 2012 at 7:19 pmThank you for the tips Vasilis. I can say that i am a newbie at SEO but i strating learning with great articles like yours.
Sagar
March 7th, 2012 at 7:38 amOptimizing posts with keywords is a great way to boost traffic also interlinking posts is important and very useful.
Jill Easey
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fast money
March 9th, 2012 at 8:02 amWhat’s Going down i am new to this, I stumbled upon this I’ve found It positively helpful and it has helped me out loads. I am hoping to contribute & help other users like its helped me. Good job.
local seo
March 19th, 2012 at 7:17 amIt does still amaze me the number of sites I come across who do not do these simple and basic things. I would ask though, meta keywords are not that relevant any more, Google certainly dont use them. What about Alt Tags? The number of sites that dont optimise their images is astounding… Good post though
Online Marketing Bangalore
March 19th, 2012 at 7:27 amVery useful article. May I know some of the other ethical seo techniques which can help me rank without much keyword density on page..
Anax
March 20th, 2012 at 4:31 amThe tips you provided are really helpful and effective.
Thanks for your help and time.
Nicholas Schleppy
April 11th, 2012 at 8:12 amWe just couldnt leave your website before saying that we really enjoyed the useful information you offer to your visitors… Will be back often to check up on new posts
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Alex Smith
May 13th, 2012 at 11:59 amHello Guys,
I know more things about internal linking and others but through this post i have really so many points which improves my SEO knowledge as well.
Thanks
Alex Smith
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May 21st, 2012 at 8:51 amHands down, Apple’s app store wins by a mile. It’s a huge selection of all sorts of apps vs a rather sad selection of a handful for Zune. Microsoft has plans, especially in the realm of games, but I’m not sure I’d want to bet on the future if this aspect is important to you. The iPod is a much better choice in that case.
Viki Hobel
May 29th, 2012 at 8:59 amI recently wanted to put a large thank you you cleared up some items personally!
SEO Company in Noida
May 30th, 2012 at 5:55 amSince Google is continuously updating its tricks to find irrelevant websites that are over optimized ,The new challenge is not the rankings but ranking and user engagement combined.
SEO India Company
June 19th, 2012 at 4:18 amThis is an amazing experience to be here and getting such type of wonderful article, information is very effective and useful.
pounds to pocket
July 12th, 2012 at 8:12 amReally seo world has changed and day by day new technique of gaining ranks are out .. So thanks for the post,, i have learned a new way of promoting my website.. from this..
Malds
September 2nd, 2012 at 4:45 pmThanks for the tips. I’m doing most of these already so I’m glad to know I’m on the right track :)
Aurelius Corporate Solutions
September 4th, 2012 at 9:29 amThis is very informative blog
Ankul Barar
September 9th, 2012 at 10:55 amI think anchor texts are still very important! Inter site liking should be done on an anchor text.
Keya Directory
November 27th, 2012 at 8:12 amI’m doing most of these already so I’m glad to know I’m on the right track.
Look-Like-Buy.com
December 14th, 2012 at 2:55 amGreat tips and information, it is good to know when you are in the right direction.
Rabijit
January 29th, 2013 at 4:25 pmVery informative post for newbie webmasters how to do basic SEO.
Precious Fab-cast Pvt. Ltd
February 13th, 2013 at 6:40 amReally works!!
Prince Bhatia
February 14th, 2013 at 10:12 pmThanks for sharing this informative post,I ust want to if we useonly off page techniques does it improve our keyword ranking or not.
Rafael
March 1st, 2013 at 6:06 pmI really appreciate your guide, it was very usefull for my web page. Tks a lot.
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March 2nd, 2013 at 8:09 amAwesome! Thanks for Sharing…
Steve
March 11th, 2013 at 5:13 amUse of Long Tail Keywords helps a lot to get traffic in high competition. If the primary keyword has high competition than Long tail keywords plays a good role to gain traffic and boost the page in rankings
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