4 Critical SEO Strategies for Your Freelance Portfolio Website

Most people don’t give a thought to SEO strategies when creating their portfolio website. However, a portfolio website is an essential tool for any freelancer. It’s one of the most direct ways you can make an impact on and grow your audience. But having a portfolio website and having a portfolio website that your audience finds are two different things.

A significant part of getting your portfolio website noticed is by effectively using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. When you hear the term SEO, you may think of someone trying to game the system to get their content ranked high within search engine results. While it’s no longer possible to “trick” search engines into displaying your content, it’s still important to keep SEO in mind to be sure you take advantage of anything that can help you get in front of more people.

In this post, we’ll look at four SEO strategies you can employ to improve the likelihood of being found by your audience. I’ve included these strategies in the order in which you need to consider them because each strategy builds on the previous strategy.

The four strategies we’ll explore are:

1. Keywords
2. Site Architecture
3. Content
4. HTML Tags

Let’s look at each of these strategies.

Keywords

In the past, when we talked about SEO keywords, we were talking about an HTML meta tag, but search engines don’t use the HTML Meta Keywords tag in their ranking algorithms anymore. This change was due to how the Meta Keywords tag was misused by people trying to rank on keywords not related to their content. It’s best to stay away from using the Meta Keywords tag.

When we talk about keywords today, we mean the words representing the main idea of your web page’s content. You should do some research to ensure that:

• The keywords you choose are actually the terms that visitors would use to find your content.
• Try to stay away from industry jargon.
• Look for keywords that get a lot of traffic.

It’s necessary to determine your list of keywords before you start building your website. Having a clear understanding of the keywords you want to target will help you build your website’s architecture and guide you when creating content for the site. Keywords should be used in:

• The URLs of your web pages.
• The content of your web pages.
• As a part of the text within the important HTML tags on your pages.

Site Architecture

Before you start creating pages on your website, you should have a good idea of the architecture your site will follow. Not only will this make it easier for visitors to navigate through your site, but it will also help search engines get a complete picture of how all of your web pages relate to each other.

The architecture of your website will determine the URLs for your web pages.

Consider these two URLs:

Unfriendly URL

https://mycompany.com/1234/27/3578.html

SEO-Friendly URL

http://mycompany.com/shoes/womens/casual-shoes.html

The first URL uses cryptic numbers to represent the different levels of the site and the final page the visitor is on. Search engines, and your site’s visitors, won’t know the meaning behind these values, so this doesn’t clarify the content on your site.

The second URL uses English text to represent categories in the site and the name of the final page the visitor is on. This is much more friendly for the user and for search engines.

Another thing to keep in mind is that visitors to your website will most likely initially get to it from a page other than your home page. With SEO-friendly URLs, the visitor will get an idea of other content on your site by seeing the URL with its categories.

Content

Now that you’ve done some keyword research and have determined your site’s architecture, it’s time to start creating some content.

Except for your home page and category pages within your website, most of your site’s web pages should address one specific concept. Topic web pages should cover only one topic. You should have a keyword in mind when you create the page, and all the SEO signals on that page should include that keyword.

When creating content pages, make sure your content is:

• Valuable to the visitor.
• Unique from other content available on the topic.
• Linkable from other websites.
• Answers a visitor’s question, if at all possible.

Scannable since most visitors don’t read all the content on the page.

HTML Tags

The content of your web pages is significant when it comes to SEO strategies, but there are some HTML tags that you should be aware of that need to include your keywords. Using these HTML tags properly will help search engines understand the content of your page.

Some of the most important HTML tags when it comes to SEO are the:

• Title Tag
• Meta Description Tag
• Heading Tags
• Image Tag’s ALT Attribute

Title Tag

<title>My Web Page is About This</title>

The most important HTML tag on your web page is the Title tag. This tag gives an overview of what your page is about.  Include your page’s keyword in the title, as close to the beginning of the tag as possible.

The text in your title tag is often used as the heading for your entry on the search engine results page. For this reason, the text within a title tag should be between 50 and 60 characters; otherwise, it might get truncated in the search results.

The text in the title tag is also used as the browser’s tab name and the bookmark name for the page. The text in the title tag is not a part of the visible text on your web page.

Meta Description Tag

<meta name=” Description” content=” A longer description of what my web page is about. Catch a searcher’s attention.”>

The Meta Description tag is used to provide a longer description of the page’s content. Again, you want to include your keyword in this text as close to the beginning as possible.

The text in this tag is often used as the descriptive text in a search engine result blurb. The length of your meta description text should be between 50 and 160 characters.

Make the description easy for your visitors to read and include something to get their attention and make them want to click your link in the search results.

Heading Tags

<h1>What this Web Page is About</h1>

Heading tags should be used to define the outline for the content of the page. This will make your web pages easier to read (or scan).

In HTML, you use the heading tags (<h1> through <h6>) to specify headings. The <h1> tag specifies the highest level in the outline of the page. It should describe the content of the entire page.

Each level down from the <h1> level should describe a subsection of the page’s content. Levels <h2> through <h6> are each less important than the level before them. For example, <h2> is less important than <h1>.

Remember to use the page’s keyword as part of the <h1> heading. Use the keyword as close to the beginning of the heading as possible.

The <h1> tag is similar to the <title> tag, but the text within an <h1> tag is visible on your web page. Also, there is some debate about this, but in most cases, you should only use one <h1> on a page. You can use multiple <h2> through <h6> headings. In most cases, you won’t use <h4> through <h6> headings.

Heading tags have default formatting applied when used on a web page. As a result, some people use heading tags to format data on the page, but heading tags should not be used in this way.

Image Tag’s ALT Attribute

<img src=” images/important_image.jpg” alt=” A description of this image.”>

Images are a big part of most web pages. They can make the experience of visiting your web page more pleasant. But search engines and screen readers for the seeing impaired cannot interpret the meaning of images.

Any images on your web pages that are there as part of the content (not just for decoration) should include an ALT attribute. The ALT attribute should describe the image and its use and should include the page’s keyword, if appropriate.

Images solely on the page as decoration should not include an ALT attribute as they do not add anything to the page’s content. Adding ALT text to decorative images just slows down screen readers.

Conclusion

There are many other essential SEO strategies you can use to improve the performance of your website. The importance of the different strategies frequently changes. But, when you put the SEO strategies reviewed in this post in place, you should have a good start in creating a successful portfolio website for your business.

For more tips to implement in your freelance life, take a look at these articles:

Working ON Freelancing…Not IN it

How To Get Started As A Freelancer

How To Get Health Insurance As A Freelancer

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Brenda Keller is a software coach who helps people feel comfortable with and learn how to use software. She has been an Excel user since it was first introduced in 1985 and has taught the program in various settings. Her new Microsoft Excel: Quick Start course was designed to help those new to Excel or those wanting a refresher to get a handle on Excel’s key features quickly. Check out her course on Udemy here or view her YouTube channel here to get more help with Excel. To learn more about Brenda Keller, check out her official website here.