Working as a freelance web designer has its charms. You get complete freedom in your work, it allows you to escape the confines of the 9-5 office routine and you can develop your creativity within the comfort of your home. But with all this freelancing also brings in some harsh realities. Like you will not have any support structure that a professional web designer can expect from his or her agency and you will have to earn your own projects unlike the designers working for agencies where this task is handled by the marketing department. So to survive in the freelancing world you will not only require unique web design skills and a flair for design but also should know the basic SEO so that you don’t make the mistakes that can potentially ruin the chances of your site ranking high and block your path to success.
No doubt your creativity and knowledge of the latest trends and colours can and will win you clients but if you make your website SEO friendly by making simple modifications like we have mentioned below you can raise the profile of your work and increase the traffic to your site which will result in more clients.
Balancing Design with SEO
By following the SEO technical rules you can improve the ranking position of your website but you will still need to bring a little heart and soul to your site. It is the design of your site that will form the first impression of your services to clients so getting the right style for your site is the most important factor.
But before integrating high quality graphics you should take in to account the effect that these designs will have on your SEO performance.
URL Structure
Your website’s URL structure should be organized and keyword optimized. It should always reflect the content of the page. Categorizing the content of the site within URL structure will not only help the visitor of your site as it will give them an idea of what kind of content will appear on the page but it will also explain the layout of your site to the Google search robots that will result in the improvement of the crawling of your page.
Internal Linking Strategy
Making the pages of the same category link to each other will enable the search robots of search engines to crawl similar content pages with ease. For example if you link all the pages regarding logo design with each other then it will allow any link juice created by back links to be shared out amongst these similar content pages.
Optimize the Anchor Text
You should optimize the anchor text for your internal, external and back links. Try using specific keywords that you want your site to rank highly for within these anchor texts. This will increase the ranking of your website for these keywords as the search robots can identify the content of your site through the anchor text in external, internal and back links.
Avoid Using Excessive Flash Graphics
Although fancy Flash graphics may increase the visible appeal of your site but the Google search robots cannot effectively read the Flash program. To make your site SEO friendly try to stick to using HTML and CSS. Using images as links instead of text can make processing by search robots a little difficult so avoid this as well.
Keyword Optimized Your Images with Alt Tags
As a freelance web designer you must include images as part of your portfolio to showcase your skills to your clients, however these images should always have keyword optimized Alt Tags.
Try Avoiding Splash Pages
Greeting your visitors with a splash page with fancy graphic and a notice saying Enter Website or whatever can be a great opportunity to create an impressive and stylistic webpage. But the Google search robots will index this splash page as your homepage rather than the actual homepage.
And most of these splash pages use Flash and as said earlier avoid it at all cost, instead try using latest developments concerning HTML 5.
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