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SEO for Freelancers

Posted February 11, 2013 in News

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Jeriann Watkins is a writer living in Boise, Idaho. She enjoys writing about many subjects, including white-hat SEO and new advances in internet technology. She currently works for Page One Power, a relevancy first link building focused company .
The internet is full of articles offering advice to freelancers. Most of these contain information about tactics that freelancers “absolutely must implement in order to be successful”. But the road to success is different for everyone, and those who actually make money freelancing know that you don’t have time to practice every trick in the book.
Websites are becoming more and more important in the freelance client acquisition process. It is important to make sure your website can be found, but if your talents do not lie in web design, it can take a lot of time and money to figure out how to “optimize” your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can refer to a myriad of strategies meant to boost your site in the search engine rankings. Below are the strategies that are likely to yield beneficial results for freelancers, without tying up a lot of time and resources.
Onsite: Page Titles
When someone peruses your site, it is important that they can understand it and easily find what they need. This means that your site should be easy to navigate. You can do this by clearly labeling pages. “Services” “Pricing” “About me”: These are all common pages on freelancing websites. You can fully optimize your site by making these specific to your target audience. If you’re in the writing industry, you might have a “writing services” or “editing services” page. If you’re in graphic design, be sure to use words specific to that field. You can be creative in your titles, but make sure that the user will be able to know what they will find if they click on that page.
Onsite: Fresh Content

It’s important to keep your website updated, but that can be difficult if the information your site provides is relatively static. Your prices and services probably don’t change that often. Consider maintaining a blog where you offer weekly insights on freelancing in your field, in general, or just how your practice is going. You can even talk about projects you’re working on if you have client approval. This is a great publicity opportunity and keeps your website fresh.
Content-wise, it is also important to make sure that you’re not posting the same information on multiple pages. If you feel that it is relevant to multiple pages, provide internal links instead. This looks better to search engines, and prevents people from seeing the same information all over your website and thinking that you just copy-paste everything.
Link Building: Guest Posts
When it comes to link building, there are a lot of misconceptions out there. Search engines are making it clear that the “more is better” mentality has to go. Relevant links that actually provide value to users are the only links that will provide long-term benefits. But these links take time to procure. Link-building is time-consuming and takes a lot of effort, so as a freelancer, you may not feel that you can put resources toward this method.
Guest posting offers a lot of benefits though, so it can definitely be worth the effort. When you find a site in your niche with an established audience, reaching out to the site owner and their audience could gain you some valuable connections. Write a post that you would be proud to have on your site, something that offers quality insights to readers. Make a video with a fresh perspective on an industry issue. This content will show people what you can do and draw them to your site. It also puts your name in their heads. Search engines will see the links accompanying these posts on reputable sites and see that your site is reputable as well. You don’t need to focus on getting a ton of links, just on getting links that build relationships. The SEO part will mostly take care of itself.
Keyword Focus
Search Engines are all about keywords. But if you just throw keywords all over your website, you’re probably not going to keep people’s interests very long. And if you’re targeting competitive keywords, you’re not going to see results very quickly.
There are a lot of free keyword tracking tools that allow you to see what search terms rank and who is ranking for them. You can then start to incorporate less competitive keywords into your content, while keeping more prized targets in the back of your head. Work your way up, and don’t worry about technical things like “keyword density”. Write naturally, and make your content relevant to the subject, and both people and robots will pick up on the quality you offer.

As a freelancer, you rely on relationships. Building repute and credibility is the only way to build your business. Take this focus in your SEO strategy and you will avoid wasting your time. The methods discussed all have multiple uses; they not only improve the way your site looks to search engines, but how it looks to people. And at the end of the day, people are where you’re going to get your business from.

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