Search Engine Optimization

Whether your site is an online store, an informational site, for social networking, blogging, gaming, or whatever, you probably want people to find you. And usually there is a specific group of people that you want to find you and maybe some kinds of people who you wish would not find you. This is all done through Search Engine Optimization.

The topic is far too large to cover here in a comprehensive way. There are many books written, online advice offered, and businesses specializing in just this area. Large companies have full time staff devoted to improving their ranking with search engines.

Many variables will contribute to your site’s ranking. But there are some basic steps that can be taken to give your site the best chance of being ranked highly.

One of the most important strategies for SEO is what’s known as link popularity or inbound linking. This refers to the number of times that your site’s domain is linked to from another site. The more times that one of the search engines records your domain in its database, the higher the value it places on that domain. But relevancy is important. If your domain is linked from a completely irrelevant site, the spiders are smart enough to figure that out and will not include it.

There are also important strategies which should be used within the programming of your site. This is known as organic SEO. All the spiders look for a sequence of related pieces of information. Things like page name, page title, page description, keywords, headers, image tags, link descriptions, and paragraph text. All these things taken together, provided there is consistency and relevancy among them all, are what the search engines will use when considering the value of your site relative to the criteria that a searcher is using.

Link popularity and organic SEO are techniques that do not cost any more than the initial time to implement. Outside of fee-based strategies, these are the best approaches to getting your site seen by your target audience.

For a no-cost evaluation of the optimization of your site, contact me.

Visitor Tracking

Let’s say you own a retail store. Your observation of the visitors to your store showed that 90% of them walked in through the front door, went directly to one section of the store, looked closely at the bottom shelf or that section, and then walked out. What would you do with that information? You would consider what is on that shelf, in addition to considering why the other sections of your store were not getting any attention. Then you would naturally make some changes.

These observations can be made of the visitors to your site. Most web hosts provide some basic visitor traffic software, usually through a control panel, which you can use to analyze the effectiveness of your site. You can also establish an account with Google Analytics which is a free service and offers detailed data about your site.

These tools can help you analyze your site’s effectiveness. You can determine where visitors are coming from, what search words they are using, what pages they visit and for how long, what time of day, week, and month sees the most traffic, etc. Empowered with the data, you can then make modification to your site, the ways and methods you promote, and other business building strategies.

Freshening Up

There are two important reasons why you should update some of the content on your site on a regular basis.

First, for live visitors, you are giving them something new to be interested in. The added benefit to you is that for every time they come back and see something new, there is a likelihood their frequency of return is greater. So give them a reason to visit again.

Second, it will improve your site’s ranking. When a spider goes to look at your site it is looking for new, updated content. If it sees that nothing has changed, it will most likely increase the amount of time before its next visit. On the other hand, when fresh content is seen, the spider will increase its frequency of visits to your site. The more indexing, the better your SEO ranking.

If you would like a free website consultation, contact me.

All design has an inherent power. Using a loose definition of the term design, we can say that everything that has been created with intent has power. It may be subtle—a crayon-drawn Christmas  scene from the mind and hands of a first grader has the power to remind us of innocence and dreams. Or it may be more affecting—the captured image of a hungry, third-world child stirs our sense of compassion.

When applied to business graphics, the effects of the power of design are more far-reaching. Good design can (and should) be part of a business-building strategy. Bad design can prevent a business from growing simply because of the impression it gives to potential customers. Think of any large corporation. Now picture the way they present their business graphically through any medium. While we can be critical (and as designers, we will be!), any successful corporation is presented to their audience with some degree of professional design. Do you think that a company gets successful first and then says “hey, now that we’re successful, lets start spending some of our profits on professional design!”? No, the professional design was an early and critical part of the success story.

Why Do I Need You?

About five years ago I made a cold call to a very small engineering company. After hearing my brief introduction and explanation of services, the lone man in the office reached across his desk a picked up a tri-fold brochure to hold it up for me. He proudly said “I made this myself and printed it on my inkjet printer, why do I need you?” His masterpiece was on plain white paper with bright, multi-colored type—shaped, shadowed, styled and positioned boldly across the center. A clip-art, cartoon illustration in a square box placed near the top and left of center. And some smaller, yet still too large and bold, text near the bottom. After a quick and deliberate shut-down of my defense mechanisms, I smiled and simply said, “I guess your all set, have a nice day.”

Just last week I was in that area again. I went in and introduced myself to the same man. It could have been five years ago. Everything looked the same and there was no obvious sign of any business success of growth. One man, one cluttered desk. I suppose its possible that this man is a millionaire because of his business savvy and just wants to downplay his success, but my guess is…no.

Would my help have changed his success? I’d like to think so, but there are too many other variables. What I do believe is that, based on what I saw of that brochure, he was hurting his own business.

A Better Example

Here’s a better example which includes you, the reader. We depend on the internet for so many things now. How many times have we searched for a product that we wanted to buy and found multiple online stores selling the same product? How do we then narrow down our choice? Price? Yes, of course. Then what? When there are multiple e-stores listing our product for the same price, including shipping, what drives our decision? Easy. The one that appears to be the most reliable, reputable, and professional. That is a perception which comes from the look and feel of the business’ site—the design! The e-commerce site which has made an investment in professional design for their site gets a return on that investment with our purchase of a product.

So design has power. Power to persuade or power to dissuade. Power to compel or power to repel. Power to make a sale or power to convince a potential customer to buy from a competitor.

There are some who don’t understand the power of design. There are those who don’t recognize that some people have made a life’s work of understanding and applying good design, not for the sake of visual appeal, but to achieve a specified objective on behalf of a client.

As one of those designers, I would welcome an opportunity to meet with you for a no-cost evaluation of your business identity. Contact me anytime.

I often use the phrase ‘push the brand’ when referring to one of many parts of an overall strategy used to build brand equity. I like the phrase because it reinforces the fact that proper implementation of any marketing, advertising, or sales strategy requires a comprehensive, cohesive, and consistent approach.

All too often, I see businesses that have an inconsistent and non-cohesive implementation of identity. Their logo may be represented in many variations of color and style; their letterhead looks very different from their business cards; a website which looks like it was put together by a programmer (read ‘non-designer’) who didn’t really care about identity—never-mind simple rules of design; a brochure that makes use of colors that don’t match or complement other applications like signage; and other such evidences that key people are not talking and there is no oversight. These mistakes do very little to push an overall brand. Instead they attempt to push smaller, independent brands, to the detriment of the business.

While I love to create within the confines of a specific project, I really get excited whenever I am invited to look at a business’ entire set of communication methods and tools. Through the process, there is a sense of cleaning and ordering after which a side-by-side comparison reveals a renewed brand identity that spreads consistently across all applications. Each project possesses the power to help ‘push the brand.’

If you would like a no-cost evaluation of your business’ identity, please contact me.