Skills

Upwork says skills "help match you with the right jobs and improve search visibility". You add them in the Skills section of the profile: start typing, pick the best match from the list, repeat, then drag the tags into the order you want, which is the order clients see. Upwork's skills article puts the limit at 20; an older general profile guide still gives a lower figure, so the editor's own limit is the one to trust.

The list is fixed. You cannot type a free-form skill. Upwork asks for correct English spelling, suggests a synonym or a less specific term when a skill does not appear, and has deliberately left out services that cannot be sold on the marketplace, giving "dog groomer" and "ninja" as examples.

Where else skills appear. At least one skill tag is required for a complete profile, and extra tags count toward the rest of it. Each portfolio item carries up to five skill tags of its own, and job posts list the skills the client wants. Since the profile now reorders itself per client, the skills that match a search or job post are shown first.

What Upwork does not say. It does not publish how much skills weigh in talent search against title, overview or work history, or whether order matters to ranking as well as to display.

How Upsight uses it. For each tracked keyword, Upsight's rank tracker records the skills listed by the profiles on page one of the search, so you can see which tags the profiles that rank actually carry. The profile score compares a profile's skills with that set.