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.