4. SEO Tips for Web Analytics Tools: Become familiar with and use these tools regularly.

Yet again, you may be wondering, what the heck are web analytics tools? In simplest terms, web analytics tools are tools webmasters use to gather data for internet marketing purposes. They can be anything from Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool to free hit counters that track how many visitors your site receives on a given day.  

One that you should become familiar with is Google’s Keyword Tool, mentioned just above. You need an account to access it, but it’s free to set up. I use this tool to select relevant, high-traffic keywords in my niche on which to write about, which leads to my next tip – writing keyword-rich articles.

5. SEO Tips for Writing Keyword Rich Articles: Lately, before I sit down to write an article, I will use Google’s Keyword Tool to see which keywords I should base my content on.

For example, if I wanted to write on article marketing. I’ll type this phrase into the keyword analyzer and see what kind of traffic this phrase gets. One of the best things about Google’s Keyword Tool is that it acts as a thesaurus of sorts for keyword phrases.

So for example, if you wanted to write about article marketing, it may return results that show that another phrase gets more traffic. So, instead of optimizing your article for the keyword phrase “article marketing,” you’d optimize it for “writing articles”. Note: This is just an example.

You don’t change the content of your article, you just use a different phrase more to describe what you’re talking about.

6. SEO Tips for Photo & Video File Naming: When you name your photo or video files descriptively, search engines can more easily identify what the content is about. This leads to more page views.

Let’s use a .jpg photo file as an example. If you had a job site for freelance writers and you uploaded a graphic to the job leads page, instead of naming the file .jpg2, name it “editing-jobs2.jpg.”

This will give the search engine a clue as to what the content is about so that it can be returned in relevant search results.

7. SEO Tips for Search Engine Friendly URLs: When you name your files, use hyphens to create search engine friendly URLs, instead of underscores.  This is very important because search engines read hyphens as a space, meaning that they recognize the words on each side of the hyphen as separate entities. This is not true when it comes to underscores.

To use an example, if a web surfer typed in the phrase “SEO Writer” and your file was named “seo-writer.htm,” for example, the search engine would return that page as a result. It would not do so if it was named “seo_writer.htm.”  

8. SEO Tips for Title Tags. This is one of the most vital SEO tips you can use to increase traffic to your website or blog. As alluded to in the first SEO tip discussed here, don’t get lazy and name all of your site’s pages the same thing. Every page on your website should have a unique title.

The title tag should contain your main keyword phrase. It is the information that is visible in the bar across the top at the top of a page when you’re on a website, so it should be directly relevant to what’s on the page.

Some expert say that it’s difficult to rank high for a primary keyword phrase without it being part of the page title. That’s why the title of this page is Basic SEO Tips for Freelance Writers (look at the top of the page).