By guest author David Sumner Within the freelancing industry, the hunt for jobs can be extremely competitive. Having extensive expertise within a certain field is not enough to separate your services from the crowd and help you secure work. Luckily, the ability of a blog to showcase your talents, make contacts within the industry and secure work is unparalleled. However, for your blog to be read by the right people, you must first get your head around some basics of Search Engine Optimization in order for your blog to rank highly for a specific keyword. You may have heard of the importance of optimizing certain landing pages and websites for keyword density and other SEO factors, but what many people fail to realize is that the principles of Onpage SEO can also be applied to blogs. Despite the word "SEO" being daunting to many people, you need not worry, as you do not have to be an expert programmer to optimize your blog and increase its ranking position through link building. Here are some key tips to follow;
Doing your keyword research:
- Choose your blog's keyword: Decide on the desired keyword with which you want to rank for, using the Google keyword tool to check for the search volume and competitiveness of your keyword. For example, if you are a SEO freelancer from London, then it makes more sense to optimize your blog for the long tail keyword "SEO Freelancer London" to improve the chances of your blog ranking higher. However is your word popular enough in search queries?
- URL title: Once you've chosen your keyword/s, place these into your blog's URL title. EX: www.seo-freelancer-london.com
- Tags: Tag your blog articles with your desired keywords – in this case, SEO, freelancer, London and so forth.
- Keyword optimized headlines: When you write articles, be sure to optimize the headline for your keywords (just as you would do with a normal landing page). - This way each individual article has a far better chance of ranking higher.
- Sticky posts: A sticky post is a section of text that can be placed permanently at the top of every page on your blog. The text that you write can be catchy and descriptive, but can also be very rich in keywords. This is a small step to ensuring that your blog ranks better.
Effective internal link structure and back link strategy:
- Internal linking: With any website it is absolutely vital that pages which are related to each other in content are internally linked to one another. This tactic improves the reading experience for the visitor as they will stay on topic when visiting other links. Moreover, internal linking of related pages is good for SEO purposes as Google likes to read categorized web content and would not value a webpage very highly that links to unrelated content. The practice of linking certain topic pages together is called "silo-ing" and can also be applied to blogs. You must take great care to include links either within the article or at the end of the article to other related blog posts. Moreover, you can optimize the anchor texts of these internal links to include your chosen keywords.
- Back link creation: The art of applying the right anchor text to links is important in two ways. Once you start using your blog to contact other bloggers within your industry and arrange your first guest article spots on other blogs, you must make sure to use the right anchor text when creating back links to your blog. If the keyword of your blog is SEO freelancer London, then use these keywords within the anchor text of any back links you create back to your blog.
Note: Vary your anchor text from time to time; using the same strong anchor text every time on all of your back links you create (for example "SEO freelancer London") looks unnatural to the Google search engine robots. Mixing it up a little (freelancing London, SEO freelancing London etc) is recommended. If everything goes to plan, then other bloggers will rate your blog highly due to both the number of blogging collaborations you conduct and also because of your interesting content. – Once your blog has a reputation then it is surely possible that you will acquire back links naturally. However, your work doesn't stop there! Use tools such as Link Diagnosis and Linkscapeto see which anchor text is being used within back links to your site. If the anchor text they are using doesn't match your keyword, then contact these sites to politely request an edit. These are some of the most important factors that many freelancers overlook when they create their blogs. A fancy layout and stunning profile picture may impress visitors to your site, but without some SEO basics it's a sure bet that potential customers will not find your site in the first place. With these tips, your blog will be well on the way to success…all that's left is for you to write some interesting articles!
Author profile
My name is David from twago, Europe's largest online mediation platform offering freelance translators, web designers and PHP developers the opportunity to find the projects they are looking for. I have a passion for freelancing and feel that blogging is an essential part to freelancing success.