Going Freelance (SEO)

rwm24

rwm24

rwm24

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3 Apr 2010
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590
I'm seriously considering going freelance as I basically don't get paid enough for what I do for the company I am currently working for. I understand it is not going to be easy.

I have enough money to live on without the working coming in so I have time to build up my reputation/blog etc.

Has anyone here tried SEO freelancing, or any other type of freelancing, either successfully or unsuccessfully and can give me any tips or advice?
 
Don't steal your Employers clients unless you want to be sued. You'll be starting up your own Agency in direct competition with them so tread lightly. If you have a good relationship you could retain them as a client.
 
Still see SEO as Snake Oil.

The whole "Search Engine Optimisation" is a bad idea. Even the words used are nonsensical.

Google and the search engines hate it. Why would they want one site to be further up than the other even though its not as relevant? Bluuuurggggh..

Code your site well & create decent content.

Sorry for the rant, but I believe the SEO market to be dead in a few years time.
 
An ex-colleague set himself up doing SEO when he was made redundant a couple of years ago. He's found it very tough and has basically given it in now.
 
Sherbs said:
Still see SEO as Snake Oil.
Click to expand...

Was too polite to say that :)

SEO is about good Semantic design and content that people searching for that content want to see and increasingly recommend to others.

Make sure the site is quick to load, scales across human and robot readers and has the content and the tools for people to +1 it.

Gaming spider algorithms makes the web a crapper place.
 
Hades said:
An ex-colleague set himself up doing SEO when he was made redundant a couple of years ago. He's found it very tough and has basically given it in now.
Click to expand...

On the other end of the scale I know someone who co-founded a SEO company around 2006 and is not multinational with a load of employees! Them few years could have made all the difference though as I agree with what was said above about it being gone soon.

Said company is now digital marketing in general, not just SEO.
 
SEO still exists because there are a lot of small companies who still think it's something they should/need to do.

Like others have said, keep to the day job, and maybe do this on the side.
 
I love how whenever anyone talks about SEO everyone thinks of it as gaming search engines or some sort of blackhat art of hacking the net. I guess there's lots of people who have encountered bad 'seo experts' who just want to update your sites metakeywords every 2 weeks :p

The big sites like the stores (amazon) & job boards (indeed) which have LOTS of content, SEO is a massive part of how they survive on the web. Unfortunately the amount of people who actually have the skill and experience to really help these companies is pretty damn small and they probably employ them in-house anyway.

When you get to be a really big site then you can have big issues with url structures and crawl paths and understanding on how they impact your sites limit crawl budget, you could have one person employed full time just monitoring and tweaking this stuff. Then there's the good old dupe content which is very prevalent on say job boards with very generic jobs being added. Then going back to your crawl paths you'd need to work out what links you allow to be indexed or followed which helps to control your dupe content and so on. There's loads more to it, so just saying it's all snake oil is pretty funny.

Oh I'm not an SEO expert :p just work with one.
 
webhound said:
I don't get why SEO will be gone in a few years? What do you see changing which will mean SEO is no longer required?
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Because the dark side of SEO was born out of immature algorithms in a fast paced industry.

As said, search engine algorithms have matured to ignore or even penalise false ranking methods as appropriate. But they're still infantile in the grand scheme of things. They'll continue to get smarter, and in that sense legitimate content is king.

What we don't know is whether the dark side will ever completely disappear. At the moment you've got a lot of people multi-blogging in order to boost rankings. This works, for now, because the content is viable and that's what the algorithms look for, it just falsifies its importance.

The white hat SEO methods will be around for some time and are a legitimate part of the industry. But what was once ignored by designers and developers is now integrated into their workflow.
 
Actually DanF hit the nail on the head, this is exactly why SEO WON'T be dead in a few years. For small external companies, then I would agree, SEO may well be dead.
And yes, content is king.
 
Yep content is king but making sure a search engine understands your content and can get to your most valuable content is what whitehat SEO is about. There are so many rules that google tells you about that all your developers really need to know about. Sometimes it can be easier and safer to bring in an SEO consultant to give everything a thorough look over before major releases.

Say you do a major site change, you've got to make sure that all the old links get to your new structure without multiple redirects which really nuke your link juice. Doing faceted searching? what links should index or should follow and which shouldn't and so on; it's usually all time consuming stuff that really needs someone with their head screwed on to look at. Most devs should be able to do this stuff but it's sometimes another thing to make this checking and analysis a regular part of their day and to have all devs on a similar skill level.
 
zhx said:
I've never quite understood some one whom deals in SEO is actually flogging? or what they do etc
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If an SEO is good they will secure you top rankings for business producing keywords.

If they're not able to produce decent rankings then they will tell you rankings aren't the only thing - it's conversion that counts.

Really good SEOs can do both.
 
I am a reasonably successful freelancer NO SELF PROMOTION!!! but I do very little SEO work now, purely because the major factors in your Search ranking is Google and Alexa and they don't really follow SEO or SEM. Content is key, and SEO & SEM is a dying art I'm afraid. Writing better content that user's like and read and talk about or share is the answer to being listed highly. Maybe looking into another part of freelancing, but I certainly would not recommend SEO my friend...
 
i would like to disagree with you a little.

I've come across quite a few companies that have beautiful content, but poor rankings.

Content helps, but is not the only thing.
 
agreed content is not the only thing, perhaps i didn't explain enough, SEO to an extent is still integral to many sites, it's a combination of content that is not only good and unique, but also optimized for search engine crawlers, ie. links, meta data etc.

I don't really want to go into the ins and out's of SEO or SEM as I believe the original poster probably knows his field, but I was merely stating that freelancing in this field alone is going to be difficult. He would need other avenues of income.
 
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