A freelancer SEO professional is a professional who is specialized in search engine optimization and marketing. Freelance SEO professionals are usually entrepreneurs within their own place of work. Freelancers usually work for themselves, so they don’t have to deal with restrictive company policies or corporate hierarchy at their job.
On-page and off-page optimization are vital to making your website a success. On-page optimization is what you do with the content that is available on your website. Off-page optimization, on the other hand, is about getting links from other websites that point to your own website and help to increase your search engine ranking.
An SEO professional works in a freelance capacity when they operate independently or as an independent contractor and independently decide how they will provide services to their client or employer.
The right freelancer is well-rounded, analytical, and has expertise in areas such as social media management and link building (link building is part of off-page optimization). I’m sure you want more detailed information on each of these areas. This article will go into detail on all three so you will know whether it’s something you should pursue.
| Takeaways |
|---|
| Freelancers should choose the programming language based on their interests and the project requirements. |
| Popular programming languages for freelancers include Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP. |
| Learning multiple programming languages can increase a freelancer’s job opportunities and make them more versatile. |
| Specializing in one programming language can increase earning potential in related projects, but learning multiple languages can make freelancers more adaptable. |
| It is possible to be successful as a freelance developer with only one programming language, but learning additional languages can expand job opportunities and increase earning potential. |
1. What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people are searching for to provide the most relevant results for users. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure; writing content, and fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other components that go into SEO include inbound links as well as onsite elements such as keyword density analysis.
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2. What Are Backlinks?
A backlink is when one website links to another website. For example, if we wanted our site to link to an article about SEO on Wikipedia, we’d embed the following code: SEO.
Backlinks are one of many factors that search engines use in ranking web pages. Backlinks can come from authority websites, niche websites within your industry, or even personal blogs. Backlinks are important because they add credibility to your website and signal to search engines that you’re a trustworthy resource this helps with your overall rankings as well as specific keyword rankings.
It’s important to note that natural backlinks (when other people link to your website) are better than paid backlinks (when you ask other people for a link), which are often considered spammy and will result in a penalty from Google.
3. What Is Anchor Text?
You may have noticed that this article has used anchor text for all the links provided in it. Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. Often blue and underlined, these words are usually part of a sentence or phrase that makes up a webpage’s content.
Anchor text provides several benefits to both search engines and users, so it’s important to understand how to use it correctly. For example, if you were looking for more information about SEO, good anchor text would be “What is SEO?” rather than “click here” (which is generic).
This isn’t an exhaustive guide on what good practices are but should serve as an introduction to using descriptive anchor text for all your links
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4. What Is Cloaking?
Cloaking is the act of showing search engine bots different content than what users see when they visit a website. This is often done to avoid search engines identifying invalid or deceptive content on websites in order to improve search engine rankings. Although cloaking isn’t necessarily illegal, it can be against Google’s guidelines and should be avoided.
The difference between cloaking and sneaky redirects: Cloaking refers specifically to showing different content to bots and users whereas sneaky redirects involve sending users to a different page than the one that was indexed by the search engines. Sneaky redirects can also fall under cloaking, but not all instances of cloaking are considered sneaky redirects.
How cloaking can hurt user experience: User experience is important for good SEO; poor user experiences will directly hurt your rankings in search results and could even get you penalized by Google if people have a bad time on your site.
If bots see a page with good information about various models of watches for men, but visitors see a page advertising cheap designer bags for women because you’re trying to game the system, this will create a frustrating situation for your visitors that could cause them to bounce right back off of your site.
How cloaking can hurt SEO efforts: When using techniques like these that try to trick or fool Google’s algorithms, there’s no guarantee they’ll work correctly which means you could end up doing more harm than good by ranking low in search results or even not being listed at all due to penalties imposed by Google!
5. How Does Google Index / Crawl Pages?
Just like a library categorizes books by subject or author, Google indexes web pages by content. Unlike a library that has to sort through millions of books and physically shelve them, Google can use computer algorithms to organize information in its index. SEO professionals refer to this index as the “Google index.
If you’re just starting out with SEO, it’s important to know exactly what an index is and how it gets built. In short:
A crawler (also known as a spider or bot) visits websites and uses keywords on pages to categorize them. These keywords could be anything from the name of an author to words describing a product or service. Once these categories are created, the crawler adds the web page URL and its corresponding description into the library (or Google index).
Google has many different types of crawlers for various purposes, but for our purposes, we’ll focus on those related to search engine optimization. The most well-known crawler is called “Googlebot.”
A search engine user then enters keywords into Google. When they click search, their query is taken to Google’s servers where it’s processed through complex algorithms in order to deliver relevant results from its database (Google index). Results are then delivered in just a few seconds based on factors like relevance, popularity (how many people have clicked on the link), PageRank (the number and quality of links pointing back at the page), and hundreds of other ranking signals.
6. Is Google Analytics Installed Properly On My Website?
To check that the code is installed properly on your website, you can do the following:
Make sure the code is installed on every page of your site. If you only install it on a few pages, Google Analytics won’t have data for those “off-the-grid” pages and will give an incomplete picture of your site as a whole.
Check that the code is installed between the tags. This makes sure that all commands are executed before anything else appears on each page while also keeping everything related to Google Analytics together in one place so it’s easy to spot if something goes wrong with it in the future.
Ensure that the code is only installed once per page by opening your webpage in a browser, clicking View Source (or equivalent), and searching for “UA” (which stands for Universal Analytics). If there’s more than one instance of this text, you should remove all but one of them to prevent potential information overload or other issues from occurring down the road.
Look at about ten random pages across different sections of your site; check that their source codes contain exactly one instance each of GA tracking code at precisely identical locations within those respective source codes if not, then some of these pages may not be sending data back to Google Analytics properly!
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7. How Do I Rank Well In Google Images?
Use descriptive filenames and ALT attributes. Google uses the filename and ALT text to tell what the image is about. They also use this information for their own indexing purposes, which can increase your ranking in Google Images as well as Google Search.
Use a descriptive title and caption attributes. The title attribute shows up when you hover your cursor over an image and the caption appears just below it on a page. These are not visible to users but can be read by search engines so be sure to include them with all of your images!
Use high-resolution images that are relevant to the content on each page or post where they appear; don’t just insert random photos from around town because those aren’t going to help anyone find anything specific either!
Use High-Resolution Images: Using high-resolution images is not only good practice for your website’s aesthetic appeal but also ensures that any pictures being indexed by search engines will look sharp on any device viewing them (i.e., mobile phone vs desktop computer screen).
use images that are relevant to the content on each page or post: If you’re writing about cars then using an image of a car makes sense but if someone else wrote something similar without including such visuals at all because they couldn’t be bothered with quality control standards then chances are nobody would notice anyway!
8. Why Don’t My Site Images Show Up In Google Search?
You’ve gone to some trouble to create a beautiful homepage for your company, with an impressive collection of images. You’ve spent time making sure every image file is optimized for search engines and made sure that the sizes of each image are as small as possible. This is an important step towards having more visitors come to your site and perhaps even clicking on your links.
But you’re worried about whether or not Google’s going to pick up on it? At some point Google uses a computer program called the “image recognition algorithm” in order to compare images it’s shown visually with those in its index, which were previously crawled by robots. If they’re similar enough, then the computer will rank them at the top of their respective category and other images in that category won’t be ranked higher than them.
To help determine whether or not an image is similar enough to another one, Google’s algorithms look at lots of different things. For instance, they often look at the text within an image (e.g., product names).
They also consider what other photos are close by a white background with a black stripe along one edge might draw a comparison with a black-and-white photo of a bowling alley and even how much resolution the image has normally will make it more likely that it’ll be ranked higher than photos without high-quality resolution but which don’t exactly match another photo on Google Images (this is especially true for mobile versions).
The best advice when it comes down to your site’s images is this: make sure there aren’t any typos in the filenames or alt text descriptions because this can cause problems; check all of your pictures using many different devices (all kinds of web browsers, tablets, and phones); make sure they’re all fully optimized and have no gaps between pixels; place them next to each other so that there isn’t too much empty space between elements; use contrasting colors if you want them to show up better against backgrounds; include keywords in the filename that describe
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9. Is My Website Penalised / Banned At Google?
To check if your website is penalized or banned by Google, you should do the following:
Check Google Search Console for manual actions. If there are any manual penalties identified here, you will need to address them before moving forward with SEO.
Look for unnatural links in Google Search Console. Look at the links to your site report in GSC and check that they all look natural and not spammy.
Check Google Analytics for traffic drops. The unexpected drop in organic traffic can be a sign of a penalty as well as an indicator of other issues such as technical problems on the site, so it’s worth investigating further!
Check Google Analytics for unusual traffic sources. Sometimes we see spikes in referral traffic from questionable sites – this could be a sign that something fishy is going on behind the scenes so it’s worth taking action now rather than later! You can also use tools like Ahrefs’ URL Rating Explorer tool which helps identify spammy backlinks pointing towards your domain name (these may cause issues for ranking positions).
10. My Site Was Penalised By Google. Should I Start A New Domain Or Fix The Old One?
If you were penalized, it means that Google caught you engaging in practices that violate its policies. The first thing you should do is figure out exactly what it was that caused the penalty. Once you’ve done that, fix the problem and restore your site to its original (or as original as possible) state. Then, submit a request to Google for reconsideration.
You may be tempted to just start over with a new domain and website but this isn’t always wise. If the problem wasn’t with your domain name itself (which is highly unlikely), then all of the backlinks and traffic you had on your old site will need to be built up again from scratch and there’s no guarantee they’ll get back up to where they were before. Even if they do, it could take months or even years until you’re able to recover everything again if ever.
Additionally, if Google catches on that your domain was penalized and then immediately replaced by another one with similar content, they may assume that they made a mistake initially or that you have several other domains running which are violating their guidelines. It’s best not to give them any reasons to suspect foul play; make sure your intentions are pure so their algorithms can see them clearly!
11. What Does The ‘www’ And ‘non-www’ Mean In A Url?
When people talk about the ‘www’ version of your website, they are talking about the URL without the www:
http://www.example.com
And when people talk about the ‘non-www’ version, they are talking about:
http://example.com
These are different URLs and search engines treat them as separate pages.
If you want to use one or the other for your website (this setting is called canonical), it’s not enough just to set it up in your web hosting settings. You also have to implement a 301 redirect so that anyone who visits `yourdomainname.com` will be redirected automatically to `www.yourdomainname.com`. Similarly, visitors who visit `www.yourdomainname.com` need to be redirected automatically to `yourdomainname.com`.
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Final Thought
In the end, though, I don’t necessarily think that SEO is the most difficult part of freelance writing. It’s just something that you don’t want to mess up. That being said, SEO is so prominent in digital marketing that it’s impossible for any online content writer or marketing freelancer to avoid.
In fact, since search engines are responsible for promoting so much content through their search results, SEO is pretty much unavoidable if you plan to create and promote your own work online. And fortunately for most freelance writers, study after study says that SEO isn’t some mysterious technique reserved only for a select few.
It’s actually a skill that can be mastered by anyone who puts in the effort and dedication. So when all is said and done, it’s really not difficult to integrate SEO into your freelance writing process. As long as you have Google’s guidelines in mind while creating your content (which you should anyway), I don’t think achieving good search engine rankings will be all that difficult.
So, if you want all the details and tutorials on how to get started as an SEO freelancer, go through the topics mentioned in this article. I hope it explained everything you need to know about becoming a freelance SEO professional.
Further Reading
The Best Programming Language for Freelance Developers: This article breaks down the pros and cons of popular programming languages for freelancers, helping you choose the best one for your needs.
Top 10 Programming Languages that Freelancers Prefer to Learn: This article highlights the top programming languages that freelancers are interested in learning and provides insights into why these languages are popular.
Best Programming Languages for Freelancing: This article discusses the best programming languages for freelancers and provides insights into the types of projects each language is suited for.
FAQs
What is the best programming language for freelance developers?
The best programming language for freelance developers depends on the type of projects they are interested in working on. Popular languages for freelancers include Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP.
What programming languages are most in demand for freelancers?
In-demand programming languages for freelancers include Python, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, and PHP.
What are the benefits of learning multiple programming languages as a freelancer?
Learning multiple programming languages can increase a freelancer’s job opportunities and make them more versatile. It can also help freelancers tackle a wider range of projects and challenges.
Should I specialize in one programming language or learn multiple languages as a freelancer?
Specializing in one programming language can make you an expert in that language and increase your earning potential in related projects. However, learning multiple languages can make you more versatile and adaptable to a wider range of projects.
Can I be successful as a freelance developer if I only know one programming language?
Yes, it is possible to be successful as a freelance developer if you only know one programming language, especially if that language is in high demand. However, learning additional languages can expand your job opportunities and increase your earning potential.
How To Get Backlinks?
You can get backlinks by talking about your website on social media, creating an email newsletter, doing guest blogging (where you write a blog post for someone else’s website), and engaging in forum discussions.
What Is A Canonical Link Element?
A canonical link element is an HTML element that lets webmasters prevent issues caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs. It works by specifying the “canonical URL,” or the preferred version of a web page.
What Is A 301 Redirect?
This type of redirect automatically sends users and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally requested. For instance, it could be used if you want to change the domain name of your website (e.g., from “example.com” to “examplesite.com”).
The old domain will remain active indefinitely and will provide full access to its content; however, you’ll need to set up permanent 301 redirects from each old URL to its corresponding new URL so that visitors can find their way around more easily with their bookmarks intact.
What Is Google Sandbox?
The idea behind the Google Sandbox Effect was that there was some sort of filter that new websites had to pass through before they were allowed into organic search results a holding area where their performance could be monitored for quality assurance purposes before being released for public consumption like fine wine at just-right temperature after aging gracefully in its barrel cellar over time (if only life were this simple).
Websites would need roughly six months within this “sandbox” before being let loose into SERPs like wild animals breaking free from captivity once again this meant not having any impact whatsoever whether those people used keywords throughout each page title tag appropriately when building out pages during early stages since those words wouldn’t show up well for searches related topics until after about half year’s worth of waiting patiently until finally being able to see.
Costantine Edward is a digital marketing expert, freelance writer, and entrepreneur who helps people attain financial freedom. I’ve been working in marketing since I was 18 years old and have managed to build a successful career doing what I love.