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.
SEO Articles: Secrets About Article And Content Writing Facts
Article and content writing for a web page have been great promotional facts that helps you to market your product or service. A good content that is SEO optimized will increase sale and generate income.
They will principally explain what your website is all about and also tell prospects concerning your product or service. Articles and website content tell your clients what you sell and several aspects of your product or service.
A quality content can get visitors to your website. How you may ask. The truth is numerous search engines search for good keyword and keyword phrases to put in their search results in order to index them.
If your article has many good keywords and key phrases, your article get a good ranking on the search engines.
For example when Google index a web page, Bing might also do the same. But Bing utilizes a type of algorithm that get a better indexing of your inbound links as well. Your article should contain good keywords which should be placed in suitable weight at suitable places. You can really place your keyword in the title, at the beginning of your article, in the second paragraph, in the center and end your article with your targeted keyword and key phrase. Do not reiterate your keywords all over your article and make sure the keyword density be between 3%-to 5% key word density
Typically, a two hundred fifty worded article would cost from 3 to 10 dollars depending on the writers skill and ability. This is a small price to pay for having a content rich site or for a well investigated and written paper.
There are also many sites that can offer you these services with their team of well trained and knowledgeable writers. They offer many writing services to cover any writing needs. A writer can be based anywhere in the world and are guaranteed to suggest good contents and articles. Each one are doubly checked, edited and proofread so that you would get your money’s worth. Web design SEO services
You can type on the search engines in order to find a good and affordable writer.
The quality web sites would maybe be the best since they have done a good job of keeping their content at a high quality to get them high rankings. Though you can also wish for to purchase and read some of their sample work to get an idea of how much it will cost you.
If you want to write your own articles make sure to choose the right keyword and key phrases.
SEO article writing can be fun when you see the results of your ranking on the search engines. Affordable content writing services
Increasing Traffic With SEO And Website Design
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.
Using White Hat SEO For Site Visibility
As the use and knowledge of the Internet has spread, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become an ever more popular concept. It is increasingly true that a successful business needs a strong online presence to compete successfully. A great variety of techniques have been developed to improve a website’s ranking in the search engine result pages. Some of these techniques are entirely ethical and above-board (The term for these techniques is “White Hat” SEO) and some of them are not so ethical (“Black Hat” SEO).
Using White Hat SEO tactics is the best strategy to achieve top ranking. They will not lead to penalties being imposed by search engine companies, and will improve your company’s reputation. After all, it isn’t just a high rank on the search engine result pages that is important, rank stability is also important. The quick boosts in ranking achieved by Black Hat SEO techniques usually vanish quickly, with little to no long-term gain.
White Hat SEO Techniques: Internal linking is a big factor in your website’s ranking. How the different portions of your site are linked will either make it easier or harder for search engines to spider and index pages. “Spidering” refers to the process the engines use to search for content. Search engine spiders are very simple programs, and are mainly concerned with text. They tend to ignore images, scripts, frames, directories, and such. Drop-down navigation, for instance, is a bad idea from an SEO point of view. It may look fancy, but as it contains little text it will tend to be ignored by the spiders, leaving the content behind it unseen. It is critical to leave text links to your most important internal pages at the bottom of your home page. This includes the sitemap, if any.
White Hat SEO Tactics: Internal linking A good website ranking by the search engine is marred by making the task of spidering and indexing difficult for it. Scripts may help in providing drop down navigation in websites but they may not be crawled and indexed by the search engine bots. Search engine drivers are insensible to images, scripts, frames and directories etc. and hence drop down navigation may not the identified by it. The look of the website may be enhanced by scripts and navigation but the function of spidering by SEO gets failed. So it is vital to include text links at the base of your landing page with links to you key internal pages together with the site map.
This is a time-consuming process, so don’t waste your time by randomly linking to any site that you can. It not only wastes time, it likely won’t bring you any results.
Another important White Hat SEO technique is creating good content for your website. Interesting text will attract more visitors to your site. Not only will it bring more visitors, it will also lead to better ranking and indexing of your web page. Additionally there will be other people out there with sites of their own who will want to link to yours. While creating quality content may take a lot of time, it is well worth it.
Optimizing the layout, structure, and presentation of your site will do a lot for it too. If it easy to use and pleasing to behold you will gain better exposure, and that translates into higher ranking and visibility.
Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing Consultant expert who provides world class Search Engine Optimization to website owners. For more information visit: http://www.seorankings.co.za
4 Advantages of Link Building!
You need to build 1-way links to your website in order to be successful online. But why exactly must you do that? There are many SEO professionals out there offering information about the best methods of gaining backlinks, but what about the basic facts of why these links are so important to the small website that may have no idea what backlinks even are? To clear that up, backlinks are hyperlinks published on other websites leading to your website and there are major advantages to building these hyperlinks.
#1 Links Increase and Page Rank Follows – There is a direct correlation between the page rank of a website and the number of inbound links published pointing to that website. But remember, a website is different from a webpage. A webpage is just one page with only one URL that can be used for linking. A website, however, is built of multiple pages that each require links to gain and maintain that same page rank. Just because the main URL of a website is ranked in the top 10 does not mean the inner pages are ranked at all.
#2 Links Increase and Traffic Follows – With increased page rank comes an increase in organic traffic. This is the best traffic because it is often a steady source of profit potential. The higher on the search engine rankings page your website is listed for a competitive keyword or phrase, the more traffic your website will have.
#3 Links Increase and Trust Follows – Websites are indexed and ranked by computers called bots. These bots take much into account when they divvy out the page rankings and one is the trust other websites are willing to show toward your website. If a website is willing to link to your pages without a trade off link (and the bots will check for reciprocals) that must mean you have some information that others want to share. Bots love that and thus an increase in page rank occurs and then traffic and the cycle continues.
#4 Links Increase and Money Follows – At the end of the day, nearly every website is in the Internet business to make money. Whether it is a non-profit organization that is trying to strum up more donations or a business that wants an online advantage so they can sell more products or services, money is what makes the Internet grow by millions of websites every week.
To complete the circle, the link popularity of a website will cause an increase in page rank due to trust and credibility. That page rank increase will drive traffic to the website and that means more face time with the people who have the money in their pockets. The wonderful world of the Internet is connected in a spider web of hyperlinks and there is just enough room to build your website into the traffic booming gem you want it to be.
But then, at the end of the day, content is KING so you will need to build more links and start the process all over again.
Go here to read more about Yasir Y Khan’s bio. Also, feel free to check out the link building website