Web Designers: Marketing a Portfolio Site
Web designers and web developers can benefit greatly from having an outstanding portfolio site. The portfolio is often a primary method of finding new business (or maybe more accurately, letting new business find you). Additionally, it is the best way for potential clients to observe your work and see what you have to offer.
Despite the importance of portfolio websites, it is very difficult to actually get yours in front of potential clients. There are so many designers and developers with portfolio sites that it causes intense competition. If you are not marketing your portfolio site effectively you will be missing out on possible business.
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
There are almost infinite topics that we could discuss about Search Engine Optimization, but one of the most important is simply building a search-friendly site. This doesn’t mean that your site will rank high, but it does mean that search engines will have no problems crawling your site to find all of you pages and to know what phrases it is targeting.
Making a site search engine friendly involves using clean, valid coding, proper use of heading tags, and avoiding practices that can make it difficult for search engines to crawl your site.
2. Use Effective Page Title that Include Your Keywords
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.
Use specific phrases rather than targeting general keywords like “web design” or “web designer.” There is simply to much competition for general keywords to realistically have a chance at ranking at the top of the search engines.
Consider specific words and phrases such as “e-commerce web design.” This is descriptive of the services provided but will eliminate a lot of competition as compared to more general keywords, meaning you will have a better chance for a good ranking.
3. Localization is an Option
One method of significantly narrowing down the competition is to optimize your site for local searches. For example, if your page title is “Miami web design” you will have a much better chance of ranking high for similar searches, and the amount of competition will be far less than with a term like “web design.”
4. Build Links
Probably the single-most important factor for achieving great search engine rankings is getting links from other websites. Getting links is like getting votes from other sites. As more sites (and high-quality sites) link to you, the search engines will give more authority to your site and ranking well should not be a problem.
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:
Add a blog – Blogging is a great way to attract links as bloggers often link out to other blogs. Of course, it will also take work to write the content.
Use social media – Social media marketing can be an extremely successful way to build links as popular items often attract links from all kinds of sites.
Reciprocal links – You can exchange links with other websites, just don’t go overboard and do this with hundreds of sites or it will put up red flags for search engines.
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. Make it Attractive
One of the best things you can do to promote your site is to simply make it special. A great portfolio design will market itself quite well. Take your time and make something that is reflective of your best work.
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 the best portfolio websites and a gallery of the best e-commerce websites.
When Web Design Is Crucial to Search Engine Optimization
When a business owner plans to put up a website, it should be automatic that search engines will have to be considered in order to ensure its maximum visibility. But while everybody in the development team can aim for creating the best design for the site, there is a propensity to ignore search engine friendliness as a key component of effective web design. A designer may come up with a good layout and general content presentation and good navigational structure, but one thing that must never be neglected is to make sure that the site has all the opportunity it can get to be able to land in search results with a good ranking.
Although web design is one thing and site optimization is another, they can be incorporated into each other in developing a site so that it actually gets to enjoy the best of both worlds. The first thing that will be important in terms of site optimization is, of course, creating content that will get it noticed by search spiders.
Meta tags are definitely the most important to focus on. Web page titles must bear relevant keywords and meta tags for the content must likewise be keyword-rich but definitely not stuffed or the whole site could simply be banned by the search engines. These things are crucial in the chances that a page could or could not be picked up by the search spiders and this will, of course, affect whether or not search results relevant to the site will be promising.
While there could be many dissimilar styles and approaches to creating the best web designs, it is important to keep the site focused on a specific center of information. This means that if a businessman has different businesses, it will be wise to create a separate website for each. When there’s too many things in one , this becomes a disadvantage in terms of its being indexed by the search engines.
Spiders generally work by picking up keywords in order to come up with a gist of what the site’s content is all about. With this gist, a search engine is able to detect if this site must be displayed on the results each time an Internet user makes a relevant search. When a site has too much areas of information in it which aren’t even related to each other, there is virtually a very slim possibility, if any at all, that it will turn up in search results.
Ease of navigation is completely a key component of a good web design but may not necessarily affect a site’s search rankings. Still, for the satisfaction of site visitors who will be the final arbiters of site performance, it will constantly be ensured due to its great value
Search engine optimization marketing has never been this popular and effective nowadays and while anyone can attempt to do it, nothing still works like a reputable seo agency in making sure your site gets all the web visibility it deserves.