Posts Tagged ‘website design’

Marketing a Portfolio Site 101

November 10th, 2009


For web designers and web developers (as well as other professionals, such as photographers) the portfolio website is one of the most important assets. In many cases the portfolio site will be a leading source of inquiries from potential clients, and it is the best way to showcase your work to anyone who is interested.

Although the importance of the portfolio site is obvious, having an effective one requires that people actually see it. Having a great portfolio is one thing, but getting it seen is another. There are so many designers out there that competition is very stiff and without marketing your site it is likely to get very little attention.

Here we will go over several tips that can help you to get more out of your portfolio site by increasing its exposure to potential clients.

1. Consider Search Engines

SEO (search engine optimization) is a huge topic that could never be covered in one brief article. However, one of the basics of optimizing a site for search engines is to simply make it easy for the search engines to crawl the site so they can accurately determine what the site is about.

To make your site search friendly, use valid code that is clean and well-organized. This includes proper use of headings, and choosing not to do anything that will trick search engines or make it difficult for them to crawl your site.

2. Include Keywords and Phrases in Your Page Titles

Page titles are critical for search engine rankings, more so than any other on-page factor. Give lots of thought to the titles that you choose for your pages and try to match them up with the same words and phrases that people are likely to use in a search to find that page.

Since there are so many sites out there already that are about web design-related topics, it’s best to pick more specific phrases that can narrow down the amount of competition you have and increase your chances of ranking high.

Try using a specific phrase like “custom WordPress themes.” This will be highly relevant to the services that you offer, plus it will give you a better chance of actually getting search engine traffic since there will be less competition for your keywords.

3. Don’t Forget About Localities

One way to make your website stand out is to optimize it for local searches. For example, instead of targeting the phrase “web designer,” try targeting “Philadelphia web designer.” This will drastically decrease the competition that you have for search rankings and it is something that local clients would actually search for.

4. Build Links

Along with the page title, links from other websites are as influential to search engine rankings as any other factor. In a way, search engine rankings are a bit of a popularity contest. Google views a link as basically a vote. When you link to another website you are essentially endorsing it.

Anyone that aspires to build a site that gets lots of search traffic will need to focus on link building. Here are a few ideas of ways to get links to your portfolio site:

Put a blog on your site – Portfolio sites and blogs are popular combinations, and part of the reason is that blogs attract links from other blogs. It will take some work to maintain the blog and publish new content, but it is one of the best things you can do for search traffic.

Market your site and blog via social media – SMM is a great way to get links. Articles that draw a lot of attention from social media users will generally get a lot of links.

Exchange links – You can make an agreement with other website owners and bloggers to link to each other.

Submit to galleries – If your site has a high-quality design you may be able to get a lot of traffic and links from web design and CSS galleries that showcase sites.

5. Create Something Amazing

In order to get your portfolio site accepted at design galleries it will need to be of very high quality. When designing and developing your portfolio site don’t rush and lose quality. Take the time to make it the best that you are capable of.

6. Use Freebies to Draw People In

Giving to get is a popular method of promoting a website. People love free stuff, so if you can give something of quality that people will want, you will increase the number of people that come to your portfolio site. You could give away free website templates, code snippets, or anything else that will attract links and visitors.

Steven Snell is a web designer and freelance blogger. He maintains a gallery of portolio websites and a gallery of ecommerce websites.

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Increasing Traffic With SEO And Website Design

November 5th, 2009


Selling a product or service to a local customer base often does not provide a business with the needed growth opportunities to thrive. By expanding a customer base a business has the capacity to expand ex potentially. However in order to expand in this manner it is necessary to employ more strategic marketing tools. One of these tools involves the use of SEO and website design.

There are thousands of websites designed on a regular basis which are vying for the market of customers that will help their businesses to thrive. Many of these businesses have some idea of that search engine optimization is. Some businesses may have been approached by companies offer SEO services and thought that it would make little difference in the overall impact of their marketability. However with careful planning and use SEO and website design are intricately linked when used as an effective marketing strategy.

SEO can play a vital role in the ranking of a business or company on the search engine directories. When websites are scanned there are certain key words that cause the entire website to be placed in a higher ranking than other website. These are the words or phrases that are used most often when people search a directory for a product, service, or information.

There are companies that offer website design services which do not have staff who are familiar with the concept or format requirements to incorporate SEO into the design of the site. There are SEO companies that do not have the staff on hand who have the unique skills and talents required to make a website design that is attractive and enticing for a visitor. However, in recent years there have been some companies created that provide both services and have the staff on hand that are trained to provide both SEO and website design.

Companies that select internal employees to create websites often find that the skills and expertise required are not available in a regular business setting. The field of SEO and website design is very specialized and requires a unique skill set that often is not found in an office or business setting. Companies that have a site designed then hire a full-time staff person to maintain the site often see much better results and also find that the long term cost effectiveness makes the initial investment of an outside resource well worth it.

When a specialized SEO and website design company is retained by a business there are many meetings held to create a design that will be effective and attract the target audience for the product or service. The language of the content must be carefully thought out and placed in the body of the website in a manner which will elicit positive responses from visitors to the site.

Many website designers have perfected techniques for creating sites that are user friendly and provide the look that is required to attract a large audience. It is the purpose of SEO to take the site one step further and provide the content within the design that will increase traffic to the site and raise the search engine ranking of the site.

A growing business finds very quickly that a well designed website affords the company many long-term benefits. The customer base is expanded from a local market to a global market, the sales of products and services increases, and the objectives of a business are more easily met. SEO and website design can be costly in the initial stages, however these costs are quickly offset by the increased sales and customer interaction that is attained.

Before you start a search engine marketing campaign, go to The Brilliant Assistant’s site for information on website design and graphic design services.

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Ten Top SEO Tips

October 22nd, 2009


1. Make sure search engines can find your website by putting your chosen keywords into the title of your website. These tags are found at the top of the website between the head tags. The chances of getting targeted traffic to your site greatly increase with this step.

Treat the title like a headline. Try to draw attention to your site with a good headline because this is what people will see in the search results.

2. Use the same keywords as the anchor text to link one page from your website to another. This is more useful if you have a large website, and the more links you can get the better.

3. Your title text should appear at least once in the content of your website. This ensures search engines know that the body of the website is relevant to the content.

Also when writing the body of your website, use your keywords once or twice. You can bold them to make them stand out or highlight them. Use them in some of the subheadings too.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

5. Meta tags are no longer as important as they used to be. Don’t stick a load of meaningless keywords in here, two or three targeted keywords should be fine.

6. Don’t link to link farms. Search engines usually know where these are and do not like them!!

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Include a Contact Page and Terms of Use page on your website. You can usually get a template by searching on Google. Search engine robots look for these and it makes your site look more professional.

9. Using the alt tag for every image, ensure there is a description for each image. This helps search engine robots index your page.

10. Submit your website manually to search engines. If you use a submission service or software your website might get banned.

Use this website traffic generator to get LOADS of targeted web traffic. It’s the best traffic generator on the net. Using it consistently WILL get you to the top of Google!

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization

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wordpress seo