If you’re a freelance writer and want to generate traffic for your website or blog, you must start learning about search engine optimization (SEO). Why? Because competition is fiercer than every on the web.
Some experts estimate that as many as 100,000 new websites go live every day That’s 36,500,000 new websites a year! And, I venture to say that that’s a conservative estimate. So following are three basic SEO tips that every freelance writer can start using immediately to increase website traffic.
1. SEO Tips for File Naming: Naming your files descriptively will help you get more page views because search engines can more readily identify what they’re all about. Let’s use a photo as an example. If you had a freelance writing website and you uploaded a graphic to the jobs page, instead of naming the file .jpg1, name it “editing-jobs1.jpg.”
2. SEO Tips for URLs: This piggybacks on the above tip. When you are naming your files, use hyphens as opposed to underscores. This is extremely important for SEO purposes because search engines treat hyphens as a space. This means that they recognize the words on each side of it as separate entities. This is not the case with underscores.
As an example, if a surfer typed in the phrase “editing jobs” and your file was named “editing-jobs.htm,” for example, the search engine would return that page as a result. It wouldn’t if it was “editing_jobs.htm.”
3. SEO Tips for Title Tags. This is one of the most important SEO tips you can use to increase traffic to your website/blog. Don’t name all of your website pages the same thing. Each page should have a unique title – one that is relevant to the content on the page.
The title tag is what shows up in the bar across the top of the page when you’re on a website. It should be directly relevant to what’s on the page, and should contain your main keyword phrase.