The SEO Tutorial: Introduction
For anyone who has done any website freelancing, you know that more and more often, potential clients are requesting some form of Search Engine Optimization in your proposal. Unfortunately, SEO is one of the most misunderstood topics on the internet, even more so for clients with little website experience. Misconceptions abound, many of which are still popular (e.g. metatags are very important, it's easy to get to #1 for common words, etc.). So where does a freelancer fit in here? Well... if potential clients want SEO, then you should probably know SEO. Not only should you be able to explain SEO concepts and ideas to a potential client, but you should also be able to implement methods to actually help your client's search rankings and thus, gain credibility. Let's get started:
The SEO Need
Search Engine Optimization is simply any set of methodologies used to improve a website's rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In other words, if you are creating a website about the iPhone, you would want to rank well if someone searched for "iPhone." Why? Because if your site shows up on the first page of Google, you will get a fair amount of traffic which can then be turned into revenue; the same is not true for sites that show up on the later pages of search results. In fact, many companies' success and failures rely solely on their ranking in these "search engine result pages" (commonly referred to as SERPs). So understandably, your clients will want to rank reasonably well for certain terms related to their industry. And of course, they believe you can work your computer magic to make this happen...
The SEO Plight
There are millions and millions of active websites in the world accounting for billions of pages on these websites. All these sites want more visitors, and all these visitors begin at a search engine, mainly Google. So it's up to the search engines to determine which of these pages should appear first when someone searches for "iPhone" or "free fonts" or "freelance blog." Obviously, search engines like Google want to put the most relevant pages first. So if you search for "iPhone" on Google, Google will give you the sites that it determines are most relevant -- sites like Apple, CNet, Wikipedia, and so on (so you can forget any chance of getting your new 5-page site about iPhone ringtones on the first page of Google for the search term "iPhone"). In fact, the chance of getting any new site to rank high for a common search term is near impossible.
Is There Any Hope?
Although ranking for common terms is near impossible, there are millions of search terms that are not as common that you can rank for. Since you can never know what people are searching for, the better "optimized" your site is, the more traffic there is for you to gather. For example, this particular site ranks in the top ten in Google for "freelance blog" and "freelance passive income." This is good considering the blog is only a couple months old and although these rankings don't generate tons of traffic, it does generate a little. Of course, the end goal is to have this site rank well for commonly searched for terms like "freelance" or "passive income."
Where to Start?
Your greatest asset in SEO is knowing your visitors -- knowing what they search for and what they want. So if you're building a website for iPhone ringtones, you ought to know exactly what your potential visitors are searching for. This means phrases like "iPhone Ringtones" or "Free iPhone Ringtones" or "Music Ringtones for iPhone." The more focused your site and phrases are, the easier SEO will be for you, and the better your site will do in the search engines. So for whatever site you're building, consider the main phrases, concepts, and keywords; then file them away to be used in part two, Website Building.
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Jad Limcaco
