How to Become an SEO Freelancer in 48 Hours

[codyjason]

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately from people who are looking to start working for themselves. Whether it’s a small business on the side, or they’re looking to create a full time location independent business, it’s obvious there’s a lot of entrepreneurial spirit out there.

Along with questions about building a business, I’m asked frequently what business I run.

If we’re going to start getting real about creating a location independent income, I’m going to have to build a little bit of credibilty.

So here’s what I do:
I’m an SEO Freelancer (for lack of a better term).

For those of you who don’t know what SEO means, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. Essentially it’s my job to make sure my clients rank as highly as possible in Google (or other search engines) for the key terms that we’ve decided are most important to their success.

One of the mistakes people make when they’re looking to start a business is they think they have to know everything there is to know on a subject. Location 180 Search Results

This is false. You just have to know more than the person paying you to do the work.

I’ll never know every single intricacy of search engine optimization (in fact, no one will), but I know enough to add a lot of value to businesses or individuals.

There are a lot of skills out there that you can become proficient in very quickly if you:

Spend the time to learn the techniques
Have the resources necessary to get you there. This is the case with just about every single computer related job out there.

You don’t need special training or fancy degrees. You just have to be willing to learn, able put in the hours to learn the basics, and not be afraid to ask for help from time to time.

Note: I want to make this very clear up front. You can Google the answer to just about every SEO problem out there. Don’t forget this.

Over the last year SEO has been my trade of choice, and it’s become a fantastic asset for me both personally and professionally.

Even if you aren’t looking to build a freelancing business, this post and the resources included will still be extremely valuable to you. Anyone with a blog or business of any kind can profit from knowing the basics of search engine optimization.

So for those of you that wanted to know what I do, now you know.

For those of you that are looking for opportunities to build you own business – read further, this may be just what you’re looking for. And if your not looking to build your own business? Well you should keep reading too, I promise you’ll learn something of value.
SEO Basics

So we’ve got 48 hours to get you to the point where you’ve got the skills necessary to do basic SEO related tasks on a freelance basis.

First things first, what exactly are we trying to accomplish and what are the components involved?

As mentioned earlier, the overarching goal is to rank your client’s (or your own) websites as highly as possible in Google for specific key terms. Let’s look at everything that goes into a successful SEO campaign:

Keyword Research. This is the process of sorting out the good key terms the bad. You may rank first for “the best freaking blog in the whole entire world” but if no one is searching for that – it means nothing. At the same time, you don’t want to try and rank for the term “blog” because you’ll never succeed – there’s too much competition. In the keyword research phase of the process you figure out which key words have the best combination of attainability and sufficient traffic, allowing you to see positive results
Competitive Analysis. This is one of the most important components when you’re doing work for a company who has pretty strong competition. By looking at your competitor’s websites you’ll get ideas for key terms, understand the strengths and weaknesses of their site, and be able to capitalize on the things they aren’t doing so well.
On-Site Analysis. Essentially there are two major types of SEO: on site and off site. On site is everything that you can control on your site. This can include things like page titles, optimized sitemap, meta data, content, optimized photos etc. Off site is everything you can’t control. The primary aspect of this is incoming links from other sites. Links are the currency of the internet, and we’ll expand more on that topic later on. By reviewing and making changes to all of the things you do have control of on your own site, you’ll be making big progress towards favorable rankings, more traffic, and in turn, more revenue.
Link Building. Let’s break this down in the most simple blanket statement possible: more links = better rankings. The higher the quality of links (meaning links from large and relavent sites) you can obtain, the more likely you’re rankings will improve.

One thing to take note of, is you don’t have to be an expert at all of these things. There are people who specialize in link building or keyword research. You won’t be able to make as much money from each client, simply because there is less work to be done, but becoming an expert in one of these fields could be a less daunting route to take in the beginning.

However regardless of the route you take, you still need to understand the basics of each SEO discipline and how they all work together.

Here are four of the most important free resources that you should read in depth as it relates to SEO basics. Seriously, go grab a beer or a coffee or whatever will keep you awake, and read these posts. If you don’t have time now, make sure you bookmark this and come back to it later: SEO Moz Beginners Guide to SEO

SEO Moz Beginners Guide to SEO. This book covers a lot of the theory behind SEO and will help you to understand they hows and whys of the field.
WebConfs SEO Tutorial. This one expands into some of the individual SEO disciplines a lot more than the SEO Moz guide, and is one of the best overviews that I’ve gone through.
SEO 101. This is a 15 part series from Search Engine Guide. It’s 15 detailed blog posts about 15 aspects of SEO – don’t miss this one.
SEO Book SEO Glossary. SEO Book is one the leading resources on the internet, and this is a really in depth glossary. It’s worth reviewing for key terms, and book marking for easy access later on.

Competitor Analysis

By now you should have a good general sense of what SEO is all about. You may have even picked up a little knowledge about some specific aspects of SEO like competitor analysis and keyword research.

When I’m getting started I tend to do my competitor analysis and keyword research a bit hand in hand. That said, make sure you have a broad sense of the market before diving right in – thus the benefit of checking out your competitor’s websites. You are going to get a few benefits from doing this:

Seed Keywords: By looking at other similar sites you’ll discover potential keywords to target that you may have missed otherwise.
Level of competency: Some companies have spent thousands of dollars optimizing their websites. Others didn’t even know you could. By understanding the level of SEO competency your competitors have, you’ll have a more clear idea of the job that’s in front of you.
Weaknesses: One of the most successful campaigns I’ve run has been due to learning from my competitors weaknesses. They had a few good key terms I hadn’t come across, but did an awful job implementing them – right down to misspelling the words! Word of advice – don’t do that. It wasn’t hard to knock them out of the top spot for a few long-tail key terms.

So now that you understand the basics of why, let’s look at the how.

Web Pro News Competitor Analysis. This post gives you a general overview of some of the components involved in looking at your competitors. It also has links to a few good resources on the subject, so spend some time reviewing.
Raven Tools Competitor Analysis Checklist. Raven posted this checklist to market their other optimization tools, but the fact remains this is a really useful checklist to get started with. If you use this and create a spreadsheet analyzing your 3-5 biggest competitors, you’re going to be way ahead of the game when implementing the rest of your process.

In the future I’ll be releasing some of the spreadsheets and tools I’ve created for my personal analysis, so keep an eye out for that.
Keyword Research

This is arguably the most important part of a good SEO campaign. The bottom line is that if you select keywords with too little traffic, you’ll have wasted a lot of time optimizing, and see little in the way of results. On the other hand, if you choose keywords that are too competitive you’ll spend way too much time trying to achieve high rankings, and you may or may not ever get there.

So how do you come up with high quality keywords?

The very first thing I do when I’m analyzing a site is check the Google Analytics for “seed keywords”. By looking at the keywords that people are already using to find the site, you’ll have a great idea of where to start. There are literally millions if not billions of keywords out there. For instance “HDR Photo” is going to bring a whole different set of results than “HDR photos”. So when beginning your research you want to be as thorough as possible.

Here are some of the best tools for come up with your initial keyword list:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This is the de-facto free keyword tool out there. When I need a free solution for keyword research, this is the first place I go and where I recommend you go as well.
Microsoft Adcenter Keyword Forecast Tool. This is MSN’s Keyword Research website, and there are actually a few pretty useful resources on this site. Definitely take a look around and get familiar with what’s offered here.
Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool. Like a lot of SEO Tools out there, Wordtracker has a lot of premium tools available for a lot of money. However, this is a useful tool nonetheless, and signing up for a free account will give you access to their basic tools for no cost.
Market Samurai. If you’re going to get serious about SEO, then getting more serious software may be necessary. This is the only premium SEO tool that I pay for. I do all of my keyword research and rank tracking in Samurai and I’ve been really impressed with the capabilities of the software. It’s a one time fee of $150, but it’s well worth it. Best part is, you can try it for free for a week to see if it’s right for you.

Market Samurai Screen Shot

Market Samurai

Well sweet, now you’ve got an arsenal of tools, but they won’t do you a whole lot of good if you don’t know how to use them.

I’ve started working on my own SEO guide, but in the meantime there are a few resources that will help get you started with keyword research essentials.

Market Samurai Dojo. Whether you buy Samurai or not, this keyword research tutorial is awesome. It helps you understand various niches and markets, and their 4 golden rules still form the basis to much of my keyword research. Highly recommended.
Make Your First $100 online in 45 Minutes. This is an extremely in depth guide that focuses on SEO for affiliate marketing. I think it can be a little intense for beginners, but there’s some fantastic info in there. I’m including it now because I think the keyword research section is particularly useful for what we’re talking about here.
Copyblogger Keyword Research Tutorial. This takes more of a slant of keyword research for blogs, but has some good easy to follow information none-the-less.

If you take a look at these three tutorials and practice the techniques, you should have all the information necessary to start successfully researching your own keywords.

A few things that I’ve done to see a lot of success on my photography blog are to target a different long tail key term on each post I do. I take HDR photos from all over the world, and HDR is definitely a niche. So I can easily rank higher for “Honduras HDR” than I could “Honduras Photos”. By doing that I’ve been able to rank #1 for dozens of HDR related key terms that individually get limited traffic, but when you add them up, send me dozens of hits a day.

By ensuring you optimize images on your site with key terms, alt tags, and meta data, you can get increased traffic from Google and Bing Image search as well. Today alone I’ve had 19 hits for “wyoming hdr” as I rank #1 on Bing image search and in the top 5 on Google.
On Site Optimization

If you haven’t been able to tell already, a successful SEO campaign doesn’t rely on any one aspect of the process. Each piece plays an integral part to your overall results. That said, you could have done the best keyword research job ever, but if your site isn’t at least somewhat optimized – you’re screwed.

There are a ton of aspects that go into successful site optimization, but to get started and get you up to speed with what you should be looking for. Take a look at this:

WebConfs 15 Minute SEO Check: This is a fantastic checklist for your on site optimization, and how I get started with most of my projects. It tells you exactly what you need to look for as well as tells you the importance of each site component. WebConfs also has a variety of other useful tools that can be found here.
SEO Workers Site Analysis: There are a lot of SEO site analysis tools out there, and most of them aren’t that great. I like this one because not only does it do some basic analysis of your site – but it tells you whats good and whats bad. When you’re just starting out, you’ll need all the help you can get when trying to figure out what you should really be focused on. Running this before doing the previous 15 minute SEO check could a good move.
SEO Moz Tools. SEO Moz and SEO Book are the two biggest SEO sites out there. The each have an incredible amount of good information, expensive premium membership fees, and great free/premium tools. There’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be signing up for a basic SEO Moz account to get access to their free tools.
SEO Book Tools. SEO Book has everything mentioned above, but it has a special deal for subscribers. It offers three premium Firefox plugins: SEO Toolbar, SEO for Firefox and Rank Tracker. I’ve found SEO for Firefox to be the most useful as it includes great SEO information right in the search results. I also used Rank Tracker for awhile before I started using the rank tracking features in Market Samuari.

If you’re going to be successful as a freelancer or with any of your personal sites, you should get really familiar with these techniques and start putting them into use on your own site right now. The best way to get started is to take all of your starting keywords and run your site through rank tracker. Make a spreadsheet of the results and rerun them once a week so that you can see your progress.

Start by optimizing all of the “+3″ items on the 15 Minute SEO Check. Track your changes and see how your rankings change in the next 2 weeks. It’s totally possible to learn the basic skills needed in order to do SEO freelance work in a weekend, however if you’re really going to be successful with it as a business you’ll need to be able to prove you know what your doing. So think of your personal site as your SEO resume. The higher your rank for main key terms, the better the chances of you finding work.
Link Building

I’ve recently started implementing some link building strategies that have made my client’s rankings sky rocket. I’ve achieved #1 rankings for a wide variety of my key terms, and am on the first page for just about everything else.

The result of this? Thousands of dollars in gross revenue over the last month. A properly optimized website can be the difference between making nothing and making a solid five figure income each month.

So how have I done this? Well I’ve done it through a lot of ways. One thing you need to understand (I mentioned it earlier, and I’ll do it again) is that links are the currency of the internet. The more the better, and the higher quality links the better as well.

So if want to form the basis of a solid link building campaign, here’s how to start:

The Backlinking Strategy that Works. This is a post that Pat Flynn wrote about how he got his niche site ranked #1 for his main key term in just over two months. You know what? It works. It works really well, and any of the people I work with will tell you the exact same thing. Put these concepts into practice and hold on tight because your search engine rankings are gonna start to sky rocket.
Top 5 in Google in 40 Days. This is the Warrior Forum post from which the previous article was based, and is a bit of a longer version of a similar strategy. I suggest if your serious about seeing SEO results that you study both of these posts – they will make you thousands of dollars both directly with your own sites, or indirectly in the way of new clients.
Directory Submissions. Not all directories are created equal, but by having your site listed in a variety of online directories, you’re building links, and in some cases building authority as well. The two best directories to be listed in are the Dmoz and Yahoo Directories. Dmoz is free, but it’s not exactly easy to get listed. Check it out and read about the requirements. Yahoo is the best premium directory on the internet – and unfortunately they know it and charge $299/year. This will get you some serious search engine cred though, and could be worth it.
Guest Posting. If you’re a blogger this one is a no brainer. But even if you have a more traditional website, and are an expert in your industry, guest posting/writing for other websites can be a good way to get high quality, relevant back links back to your site.

Now that you understand some of the basic strategies to successful link building, how about a couple tools and strategies that have worked extremely well for me:

Unique Article Wizard. This bad boy is awesome. I’ll be totally up front – using Unique Article Wizard kind of sucks. You essentially have to rewrite the same article 3 times, create a bunch of resource boxes and doing so can be time consuming. I can now pump out a published article in about 45 minutes, but it may take you upwards of 2 hours starting out. It’s boring, can be frustrating, and will have you swearing off article marketing for good. Until you see the results. Within a few weeks, you’ll start to see your daily hard work pay off, and you’ll understand why this is worth the $67/month. If you’re really serious – hire someone else to write the articles and never look back.
Free blogs. Want to know what the very first thing I do after deciding on a specific keyword is? I register domains at blogger, weebly, wordpress, livejournal, hub pages, and squidoo. For example if I was targeting “Honduras HDR” – I’d register hondurashdr.blogger.com – and I’d spend an hour or two building a blog around the keyword. I’ll use high quality spun articles, good photos, perhaps a video and build a useful resource on the topic. Then I’ll link to these sites in UAW – thus building their authority. I do my best to ensure these are high quality resources about the specific topic, rather than just spam sites. Check out the articles above for a more detailed look into how to do this successfully.
Top Tier Article Directories. There are around five article directories that I will manually write for and submit articles to on a regular basis – and then I’ll link back to them via my spin UAW articles. These are: Ezine, Article Dashboard, Go Articles, Buzzle, and the Free Library. The power of these articles, the free blogs, and the on site optimization are enough to catapult your sites to the level they deserve to be at.

All that said, at the core of my strategy is ensuring that I’m not spamming anybody. I want to make sure my articles are high quality, useful to anyone searching that specific topic, and add value to the world rather than just polluting it. This isn’t always easy to do, and can be really time consuming.

But the bottom line is, it works.

Just in the last 15 minutes I’ve seen another $1,000+ sale roll in from a site that’s ranked #9 for its main keyword. A month ago it was over 100. Imagine where it will be in another month when it’s in the top 3?

SEO is powerful – and that’s why it’s such an excellent skill to learn.
Finding Work.

Ok, so once you’ve built your skills, and feel confident with your results, how do you go about marketing your skills to the rest of the world? Good question, but the best advice I have in the beginning is to read my last article: Three Ways to Grow Your Business Right Now. That will get you thinking about ways you can ramp up your efforts, exposure, and personal brand. The more you can network online and in person, the more opportunities will come your way – so don’t be shy.

Over the next two months, I’ll be putting together a much more detailed guide to SEO and how it relates to building a successful location independent business. Rather than linking out to other tutorials, I’ll be developing my own in depth guide to the strategies that have worked the best for me, and ways you can capitalize on similar things. If you have specific questions that you’re looking for answers to, shoot me an email or leave a comment and I’ll do my best to make sure it’s covered.

So what are you waiting for? If you’ve been looking for a location independent business now is your chance to get started. Looking to get into another industry and don’t know how? Let me know what it is, and we’ll find you some answers.

If you enjoyed this article, then you’ll love my free ecourse designed to turn you into a location independent entrepreneur – check it out in the sidebar. If you still want more business-y goodness then hit up the Facebook and Twitter feeds.

[bluntman]

Love the info, just getting into SEO

[supercharger]

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Original article with links still intact ;-)

http://www.seanogle.com/uncategorized/be...freelancer

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[Hatful Of Hollow]

(06-06-2015 05:05 AM)bluntman Wrote:  Love the info, just getting into SEO

I would suggest that SEO advice from 2011 is best avoided.