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As a virtual assistant, you need to have a strong online presence. Whatever your skills set is, you should have some sort of online presence, showcasing your skills and providing samples of your work and experiences. For writers or photographers, this online portfolio could be a blog or simple website. For other professionals, your LinkedIn, or virtual resume page, may act as your portfolio. Whatever medium you choose, the simple truth remains, if you want to secure great jobs and clients, you need to have a portfolio and body of work readily available and easy to find. You can have great samples of your work, and a wonderfully designed website, but if no prospective employers are seeing it – what’s the point! This is where search engine optimization or SEO as it is commonly referred to, comes in. SEO basically means, improving the visibility of your website or page, on search engines’ organic or unpaid search results. In layman or freelancer terms – this means, getting your site to appear prominently on search results, without paying for promoted results or advertisements. This seems easy enough, but it is actually a comprehensive and intuitive process that requires you to think carefully about your web page’s content and overall design. Here are a few tips on search engine optimization, that you can implement yourself, on your online portfolio page: 1. USE KEYWORDS! We can’t stress enough, the importance of using keywords. Keywords are essentially, words that are commonly searched and will directly impact whether or not your site appears on certain searches. For example, if you are a writer about humanitarian issues in the Inquirer, you want your online portfolio to appear in search results for Inquirer, humanitarian, aid, development and other similar words. Therefore, you should be using these words in your content! Starting with the titles of your posts, articles, art, whatever it is you want to showcase. 2. Use tags and categories wisely Every blogger will tell you, tags are a great way to improve your readership. Similar to keywords, tags and categories are searchable terms that your site could appear under. For example, if you are a graphic design freelancer, go ahead and tag or categorize your posts and samples under frequently searched categories, like art, design, and graphics etc. 3. IMAGES! We are a visual generation. We want information, all at once, and easy to comprehend. This is why infographics and other visual data representations have become so popular. Your online portfolio should include several visual elements. Tag these visuals and label them with the keywords that you want your site to appear in search results for. 4. Watch your permalink You want your permalink to reflect the content you have posted. For example, many bloggers will write a great article about an issue, then title it something artistic like, ‘Bugs and other things” and most web-hosts will simply use the title of your post as the permalink. Now, unless your content is actually about bugs, you are not helping your search engine optimization that way. Think about it this way, if you ran a search for financial management freelancers, and an online portfolio came up, with a permalink like that – would you hire that freelancer, or even click on their link for that matter? Probably not. And one of the most important things to do if you want to improve your visibility on search engines and the like is to just have good content. You can use all the keywords and little tricks you want, but if your content isn’t good, or your samples aren’t substantial, you won’t be a contender in the freelancer race. Read more about it: http://www.virtualassistant.ph/increasing-your-online-portfolios-visibility/
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