I’ve been cranking out a lot of videos lately, and this was almost one of them, but I kinda want to just write something for a change. In case you fine folk were curious about what I’ve been up to lately, I’ve been working on a YouTube SEO training program. It’s been fun, but holy guacamole is it a lot of work.

So, today I want to tell you how to get your Proz.com profile to show up in Google search results.

The first thing that we need to do is make sure that our profiles are being indexed by Google. Basically that just means that Google knows that they exist and can show up in a search result. To do this, go to Google and, in the search bar, enter “site:proz.com/XXXXXXX/XXXXXXX” obviously you replace the X’s with your profile number and the type of profile you have (see the picture further below). Just copy it from the URL of your profile. When you click Search, you should see something like this:

Now, we’re going to be referencing this image a couple of times, so take a good look at it. This is what Google shows when I search for my profile. You can see that it is quite clearly indexed and it’s picked up my Kudoz questions.

If you don’t get any results, there are a couple of things that could be going on. First, your profile might still be new and it hasn’t been read by Google yet. In that case, you’ll need to wait a little while. It could be a day, it could be a month, we don’t control Google and they decide when they want to scan Proz.com. There used to be an option to hide your profile from the search engines (or I may just be imagining that there was). If you ever pushed that button, go turn it off.

The next thing that we want to do is change the text that shows up in the link description. This part is pretty easy, it’s the first couple of lines from your About Me section. So, stick an important keyword in there, like Professional Spanish and English Translator in Utah, for example. You want to adjust your title tag to say something similar – you can find that by clicking on the Search Engine Optimization link on your profile editor. So,

Now, most start to get nervous when I talk about keywords. All you want to do is use whatever you want people to search for in order to find you. If you want to be found when people search for “Best My little Pony Translator” that’s what you use for your tag. If you want to show up for “Legal Translator in Canada” then use that instead. It’s a lot simpler than most make it out to be. There is more that you can do to optimize this, like finding out how many searches a particular keyword gets or how much competition there is for each keyword, but that’s a lot more complicated than what most of you are going to need. This video here titled Learn Affiliate Marketing Step by Step actually covers it in detail if you’re interested, though.

So, to recap thus far – we make sure that we’re indexed, then we change our title tag and use our keyword in the first couple of sentences in our About Me section. Under the Keywords section of the same place that we change our title tag, make sure to add your keyword again.

Pro Tip: don’t use single words as keywords. There is usually a lot more competition for keywords like that and it won’t really do you any good. Instead, use phrases like what we’re using here. These are called Keyphrases or Long-tail Keywords.

Once all of that is done, we need to juice up the authority of our profile in the eyes of the almighty Google.

This part is a little trickier, so the best thing to do is pay someone to do it for us.

We’re going to be using a service by a company called Ignite First. What they do is provide backlinks to our Proz profiles so that Google ranks us higher. I’ve been looking for good analogies to explain how this part works, and I think I’ve come up with a good one.

When you’re friends with a bunch of popular people, you become popular by association. However, should you spend time with the nerds (which I can only assume is what the majority of us did anyways), we become branded as nerds as well. Backlinks work the same way. A backlink is when one website creates a link to another website. I’ve added several backlinks in this post, one to a YouTube video that I posted and one to my YouTube SEO course. When you have lots of links for high quality websites, Google sees your site as high quality as well and will rank you higher in the search results. If you have links from bad sites, you are bad by association and you will rank lower.

It’s pretty easy to goof up, so that’s why we will typically leave it to the professionals. Ignite First actually has a pretty good explanation of what they do and how they do it, so I’ll let you read that on their site. Once you’re comfortable with it, you just pay for your order and send them a link to your profile. They will usually ask for a keyword or two, which you should already have, so simply provide that to them.

There are two reasons that I like this particular provider:

– They do whitehat links, that means that there’s no spam or anything like that, you’re getting good, quality links from a trusted source, and
– They can handle foreign websites as well, meaning that if you want to do the same for your own website, these guys can help you.

By doing this, you should start seeing your profile show up in the search results after a few weeks (again, we don’t control how quickly Google does its thing).

Before ending, let me answer a couple of questions that I’m sure many of you are asking:

– Will this get my Proz account banned?
— Absolutely not. Not only is this helping you get more traffic on your profile, but it actually helps Proz.com to perform better as well. They should be thanking you.

– There are other offers on this site that are both more and less expensive than this one, can or should I use one of them?
— Much like the world of translation, you get what you pay for, so I wouldn’t recommend going for cheaper services unless you’re willing to invest in several of them. You can certainly get more expensive services done as well, and I have a couple that I recommend. I selected this one because they’re awesome, moderately priced, and can handle foreign sites as well.

– Will this help me find direct clients or agencies?
— It will depend on the keyword(s) you choose, but I get a lot more direct clients than agencies.

– Why not do this to my own website instead of my Proz profile?
— Good question! The short answer is that Proz is already a powerful and authoritative website, so any boosts that we give our profiles there will be much more effective. You certainly can do the same to your own website, and I would advise that you do exactly that, but this will give fruit much more quickly.

– Are you doing this?
— I am. My profile isn’t as optimized as it would normally be, but I’m not actively looking for translation clients right now. I have done the same thing with my other profiles and websites, which is how I my clients now find me. It really works.