How to become a freelance SEO expert?
Over the past few years, the demand for SEO jobs has increased significantly. This job has become very popular and well received, which is a strong incentive to enter this field. Considering that there are no colleges offering seo degrees yet, it is up to you alone to find your way to this creative career. The mission of this guide is to educate you about SEO and how to enter this field and start your journey to become an SEO expert, the options are many and the job skills are varied, we will make sure to cover them as adequately as possibility.
Who is the SEO expert?
An SEO expert or a search engine optimization expert is responsible for optimizing a website to rank higher in search engine results, and its main goal is to rank higher in search results and get more traffic from searchers on the Internet. Of course, experience is a relative term, but in our approach, experience simply means getting enough knowledge to achieve good results for your client, not just becoming an SEO specialist.
ABC SEO: Search Engine Ranking Factors
We will now address the basic information that any SEO expert needs to know, it is not an exaggeration to describe these basics as being like chemistry where different ingredients are mixed together to produce the final “search results page” the arena of competition between SEO professionals.
1. How does the search engine work
The search engine mechanism can be summarized in three main steps:
- The first step: Google sends spiders (bots) to find pages in the Internet. The spiders crawl the web and read the text in the source code of the web pages.
- Step Two: Once a page is crawled, it is added to the search engine's index (archive) which is a large database with a uniform structure, comprising trillions of pages, and the indexing process (site archiving) involves discovering the keywords on the page.
- The third step: When the user searches the web, Google searches the index pages that match the search query (keywords), and ranks the results based on Google's algorithms that include many ranking factors.
This means that when you search on Google, you don't get results directly from the web, but Google shows pages from which it has indexed before, which is why search results appear within milliseconds.
2. What are the classification factors?
Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its algorithms. SEO experts struggle to find them all, so you don't need to study them all, but it's important to know that they are used to measure three things:
- Relevancy: The degree of relevance between the page and someone's query.
- Authority: means the site's "cognitive authority" on the subject, which reflects how much Google has confidence in the content it creates. It is measured by the number of links pointing to the page as a source.
- Quality: Quality is measured based on various factors such as the popularity of the site on the Internet, the format of the content, and how visitors interact with the site in search results.
The searchengineland blog, which specializes in search engine news, has embodied important ranking factors in a beautiful and easy-to-understand visual design in the form of the periodic table, which addresses the most important elements of success and failure in search engine optimization, divided into six categories: content, HTML, trust, site structure, links and user experience . Give each item a relative weight that indicates how important it is.
ways to learn seo
The following are the most important possible paths to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which vary in features and characteristics:
1. Search Engine Optimization Tutorial:
This option ensures that you obtain a certificate that you have the appropriate knowledge in SEO and can work in it efficiently, and gives you credibility at the beginning of your career. It is the most expensive option - unless it comes from a free resource - but the fastest, in a few weeks you'll be finished with your education, with great ease in absorbing the information with the help of qualified instructors.
You may be able to get it at a local training center or through the ever-growing digital educational platforms. For example among the free educational expropriations; SEO Learning Course from Hubspot Academy, Free Courses Offered by Semrush, Hassoub Academy Lessons and Articles, and Learning Center at Moz which is a leading platform in the world of SEO and provides free educational content.
One of the most important weaknesses of this option is the theoretical educational content that is far from real practice. This requires you to do some research on practical projects to apply what you have learned within the curriculum.
2. Your website
It is the most effective way to learn SEO on the ground. If you already own a website then you have a golden opportunity to learn SEO by doing, applying the best SEO strategies and testing them for yourself. You will learn quickly on a journey that is not easy with a lot of trial and error on your own without anyone's guidance.
In order to create your own blog or website you will need to choose a topic you are interested in, then buy the domain and hosting, then design the website and start writing professional articles. To get started based on a good knowledge of SEO check out the Arabic guide prepared by Google to help beginners, and check out the following resources in the skills section.
Apply what you've learned to the site by optimizing content, building links, and making sure that the technical aspects of the site are sound from a search engines perspective. It takes continuity to publish content until you get results on the search engine results page, and in this case, you can use the writing and translation services on Fiverr, to help you produce the required content if you are not able to create it yourself.
3. Work with an e-marketing team
This option is not available to everyone, but it may come as a subsequent step in theoretical SEO learning as an internship or a permanent job. And it could be a change of path for your current job if you work in an e-marketing field and want to become an SEO expert. You will learn quickly in this path with the help of experienced colleagues who will shorten your learning journey and share their knowledge with you on real SEO projects.
What are the SEO skills that you should learn?
SEO is a world of techniques and skills, and at the beginning of your path to becoming an SEO professional, it is necessary to know exactly what skills you must master, on the one hand in order to choose the educational path that includes the largest amount of these skills, and on the other hand, to know what skills You are lacking and you must work to gain it. SEO skills can be divided into two categories that should be mastered gradually.
1. Basic SEO Skills:
- key words
Keywords are the starting point of any SEO campaign, the right choice of keyword will push the page to the top of Google search results for relevant search queries targeted by thousands of searchers. While the wrong choice leads to burying the site at the bottom of the fifth or tenth page of search results, where the abandoned pages are not visited by anyone.
The appropriate keyword is the one in which three elements meet: it has an acceptable search rate, the target audience is interested in it, and the degree of competition for it is not great. The target keyword list should include both long and short keywords, both Brand Keywords and NON-BRANDED keywords
- Content Industry
The role of the SEO expert in the content is similar to the role of the director in the artwork, after he defines the keyword, and the writer creates the content, the SEO expert makes sure that the content came out in the best possible way, unique and substantial, rich in information and of sufficient length equal to or greater than what the competitors offer.
- technical seo
This skill helps the SEO expert to employ many accurate and important technical details in favor of improving the appearance of the site in search results and encouraging visitors to click, among the most important of these details:
- Title: Attractive includes the main keyword and no more than 60: 75 characters.
- Meta description: informative and brief, no more than 160 characters.
- URL: A short descriptive title of less than 100 characters.
- Alt texts and image names: clear and relevant that includes the target keywords.
- Site structure: hierarchical and organized, so that the home page includes links to category pages, which in turn includes links to products in each category.
- Internal links: scattered throughout the site, using clear and concise text within each page.
- Speed: The site has a good speed.
- External links Backlinks
The above skills fall under the name On-Site Seo or internal SEO, while the external link skill is called Off-site seo or external SEO, and it is concerned with obtaining links from other sites that refer to the content of the site whose content is required to be improved for search engines. It is an important means of allowing search engines to discover the referenced content, and to determine where the page should rank.
The focus should be on high-quality content in your link building campaign, with the hyperlink text being descriptive and concise. Planning for building external links goes through three steps:
- Choosing the content to be referenced, or building it from scratch after examining external links obtained by competitors.
- Identify targeted trusted websites with a high Domain Authority.
- Communicate with these sites and request the inclusion of an external link
An external link building campaign requires a mix of analysis, content creation, and public relations. This step-by-step guide deals with the process of building backlinks properly.
2. Advanced SEO Skills:
As the name implies, this set of skills represents the advanced level of work in search engine optimization that you will need to master in order to earn the title of SEO expert. Here is a presentation of the most prominent of them with some educational resources to learn more about them:
- Google Analytics
We have referred to the word analytics more than once in the article, and Google Analytics is the number one tool for analyzing your site and understanding how to measure the success or failure of your SEO efforts, and it also helps you discover new SEO opportunities. For example, the best performing content, which you can exploit in an external link campaign as we indicated in the previous paragraph. In this series of articles, you will learn the basics of using Google Analytics.
- User Experience
User experience is an indirect factor in Google's ranking algorithms, yet it has a very objective importance. For example, let's say your visitors are having difficulty using it. This will undoubtedly cause them to leave it for other search results which will hurt your ranking on the results page. The book, Introduction to User Experience, presented by Hassoub Academy, deals with a full explanation of the basic and important concepts when thinking about how to design a comfortable and excellent user experience for the customer.
- SEO Tools and Software
It is a skill that you must master in order to reach a lot of important information that you need in your work in the shortest time and with minimal effort, and it is a very logical condition for becoming an SEO specialist. Notable among them are, for example: Ahrefs, MOz, SEMRush and Yoast SEO. You can learn more about the best SEO tools in this article.
- Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is an integral part of any marketing strategy, and since SEO is at the core of competition with other sites for the top spot in search results, it is very important to study and analyze competitors to learn and learn about their SEO techniques, and then better match them in something like reverse engineering. . For example, content design and length, external links, target keywords, and site structure.
- Mobile compatibility
Google currently has a policy of archiving mobile-first sites, which means that mobile-compatibility is no longer optional in SEO but a must. To learn about the mobile-compatibility best practices that Google recommends, check out this topic.
How to become a freelance SEO expert?
Experts recommend putting everything you have learned about SEO into practice in real projects in order to become a true SEO expert. Either by employing your personal website for this purpose, because you will be able to make the required changes quickly as we mentioned earlier in the methods of learning SEO, or by working in the job of a freelance SEO professional and start offering your SEO services in front of real clients.
For example, you can create a seller account on Fiverr for micro-services, and design an SEO service in which you showcase what you are capable of, to start receiving purchase orders from interested customers.
Your knowledge of SEO is a competitive advantage in itself, as not many people have it, and even those who own it often cannot do all the SEO tasks themselves because they are numerous and require time and focus. Think of the first orders you get as training projects rather than a for-profit business, as the more buyers and the more experience you have, the higher the price of your services and the profit you hope for.
How do you read the results of changes that occur to the site?
After you make improvements to your site, you'll need to notice changes in its ranking in search results. Initially look for results that are large and consistent, and don't presume that your improvements are always the cause of any results that occur.
For example, if you add a number of keywords to a page, and you notice that the page rank is 5 instead of 7 in the search results. Don't always assume that your optimization caused it, Google often makes changes to its algorithms, which can cause a few ups and downs in site ranking and traffic over the course of the month.
Instead, take care of the big changes, and in order to make sure that your optimization really affects you, do it on different pages. If you notice the same consistent results, that means what you did was the reason for those results. There are many optimization factors that you can make, for example: improving the title with the appropriate keyword, changing the style of content from lists to directories, increasing the number of content words, or adding internal and external links.
How to choose your profession as an SEO expert?
The designer, marketer, developer, engineer and other disciplines, her skills are embodied in the shape of the letter T. The same is true for the SEO expert. This means that you master a wide range of SEO skills, but excel in one particular area.
For example, you may be superior at keyword research, SEO, backlink building, technical SEO or website archiving. Rather, it may target specific markets, for example, e-store owners, or local companies...etc.
Do not rush to choose a major when starting your SEO journey, and learn about everything related to SEO in order to build a solid foundation of knowledge about the field first, and then choose your major after some time. Accepted request.
What are the tasks of an SEO specialist?
An SEO professional's job list includes some or all of the following responsibilities:
- Manage SEO campaigns through keyword research, content development, and internal SEO.
- Conducting a site analysis and checking the quality of the content.
- Develop technical SEO recommendations.
- Determine SEO success metrics, and required performance indicators.
- Develop public relations with other websites and companies to share content and obtain external links.
- Use SEO tools to monitor and analyze the site and competitors' sites and extract the information needed to improve the site.
Read daily about search engine optimization
One of the best habits that SEO experts are keen on is sticking to a daily board reading about SEO. Search engines make changes daily - even shorter - and you need to know the impact on your site and have explanations for changes in its ranking if a customer asks you. Seeing helps you solve problems you may encounter quickly and easily because you've read other people's thoughts and experiences on the matter.
It should be a priority to follow Google Webmaster Blog, as well as SEO blogs like Moz, SEMrush, and Yoast. Check out the new news, recommendations, and guides, and never stop refining your knowledge of what's new in SEO in order to maintain the quality and effectiveness of your SEO services.
Finally, your journey to becoming a SEO expert requires two keys to be successful; The first is a high willingness to learn, and the second is the practice of applying what you have learned. We hope that this guide will pave the way for you to start your journey in the light of basic knowledge and useful sources for information, and answer many of your questions. Now it's your turn, share with us your experience, experiences, opinions about this trip so that others can benefit from it.