In a previous article, 4 things to look at when promoting a new site and doing Search Engine Optimization, I explained link building to some extent as well as the concept of Meta Tags.

Now I wish to clarify these concepts a bit more and set the priorities straight. Those of my clients who do write their own meta-tags often struggle and take a long time. I think the trick is not to over-think it. Meta tags are only 10 – 20% of what makes your site rank high on searches. So let me talk about the other 80 – 90% first. I will cover meta-tags in more detail next week.

Link Building

Why do it?

Not building link to your site after having it created is like BMW spending 30 billion dollars on research and production on a new car model and then not advertising it anywhere. What would happen? A great product would go unnoticed. You’ve hopefully paid graphic designers with some savvy (like me, hint hint) to build a really nice site, so make the most of it. I have too often seen that good advertising and weak products make more money than good products with bad advertising. I prefer to have both a good product and good advertising, but sadly many firms do not hold this belief. Most firms believe in the making money only.

You have to realize that a great site with no links pointing to it is invisible to google. How will google know about your content?

How to advertise?

Paid options: There are paid options like google ads which allow your site to show up in a little yellow block above the search results when when your terms are searched for. You pay for this service per click. There are also other sites that offer similar services. These are not bad services but I will not claim to be an authority. If you do go this route you had better make a sale for a significant amount of clicks to your site since you pay for every click.

Free options: Get good sites and industry-related sites to link to you using the right text for the links. There are many ways to do this. Links from older sites rank higher and from sites with higher PR rank higher. For example, if you were able to convince Sony.com to put a link pointing to your site on their home page using the words “CD players” and you had a site about CD players, the chances are good that your site would perform well for that search and that your site wwould get a good Page rank in general since Sony.com has an excellent reputation and has been around for years and years.

What are my options to get free links?

Networking sites: Many people post links on Facebook groups, Facebook profiles, Youtube video descriptions, Myspace pages etc. There is one problem with this… While I do think it is good advertising, those pages use, what is called, a “No-Follow” attribute. Don’t worry about the technical jargon. It’s basically just something that was created so that a site like Facebook doesn’t have to take responsibility for all the links going out from it. If people put up links that linked to blacklisted sites and low-quality sites Google would start to see Facebook as a low-ranking page. Therefore the no-follow attribute protects facebook, but it also means that that link means nothing in terms of how highly Google thinks of your site.

Blogs: Any site can use the no-follow attribute and blogs are no exception. Most blogs use it. I can’t believe how many times I get mailed comments for my blog that are obviously fake spamming attempts. They try to appear real, giving a fake email, real web-site, fake name, and a message that is general and vague. I think it’s hilarious since it wouldn’t make any difference to their sites whether I accept the comment or not. Even funnier is the fact that the name of the sender is used as the link text. So if “Allan Parson” posts a comment and puts his new site in the site field, he would be improving his ranking for the search term “Allan Parson” if my site wasn’t protected by “No-Follow”. That certainly is ridiculous.

Some blogs don’t use No-Follow so in those cases it can work. Leave a sincere comment and in the name field, put your keyword. E.g. “potatoes in pretoria” and put your site link in the site field. To determine which blogs use no-follow you will have to Google to learn how to do that. It is beyond the scope of this article. Google does look at links from blogs differently though so it can’t be your only solution.

Link exchanges: Find sites that are in the same field and that you want to exchange links with. Make sure they are not banned from Google’s search results though. If you wish to check their Google Page rank and Alexa ratings, use Firefox as your web browser (www.firefox.com) and then use this handy plug-in (searchstatus) to see the Page rank and Alexa rating in the bottom right of the browser when you are on a site.

Remember Google rewards sites with good content. DO NOT link to sites that are about everything and anything. Sites in related fields and in the same country will provide far more valuable links than random insignificant sites will.

Article marketing: The last option I will mention, which is also very popular, is the use of articles. Write an article about a topic your site is about and publish it to a big article directory like http://ezinearticles.com/. Put some text links in the article. E.g. If you sell potatoes and you want to show up for that keyword, link the word potatoes in the document to a relevant page on your site. If the article is good and popular and many webmasters put it on their sites, you get a link for every time it is used. The problem is that Google dislikes duplicate content, so don’t use the same articles on your own site, and keep writing articles monthly, or weekly. This is a long process and is what many paid SEO companies do for you.

Finito

These are all the options I will list for now. If you can think of any others, don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments!

Related articles by me:

• How to write website content and make sure your design works
• More thoughts you should have before starting a website
• 4 things to look at when promoting a new site and doing Search Engine Optimization

Introduction

In order to provide my website customers with the best service I have decided to compile this document in order to aid my clients in making decisions regarding website optimization for search-engines as well as content choices.

There are many many things that are taken into consideration by Google when rating and ranking your site. By weighing these many factors the engine decides how high your site scores when ranked for certain search words. Did I mention there are MANY factors?

Everything, from how many years your domain is registered for, to how many visits you get, what your content, links and meta-tags consist of and how many people link to you, plays a part, to name a few. However, there are certain things that do matter more and are certainly not that difficult to implement considering that it directly affects your success in business. Here is my list.

Something to consider

When you register a new domain Google will put it in the “sand box” for anything from 3 to 6 months. This is to ensure that their results are not compromised by sites that are here one day and gone the next. It wont be featured in other words.

If you use paid links, not advertisements, but actually pay people to link to your site, or otherwise attempt to manipulate the system, your site will be blacklisted and won’t show up in search results at all. The same goes for trying to put your site on many worthless automatic link sites that are free-for-all.

The focus of the site should always be on good content. Never allow links to pages of your site that don’t exist yet, or which are under construction to compromise your content. Any missing pages, or images on your site, or missing pages that you link to on other sites will count against you.

Factors that work for you

1. Content

Make sure your content is well-written and uses words and concepts that you think people will search for. Realize that people on the internet have extremely short attention spans. Studies about how people surf the web have proven this over and over. People want it all and they want it now. If someone opens 10 pages for a search and can’t find what they were looking for on the page easily, they will simply leave. Do not duplicate content. You will get penalized in the rankings. My guide to writing content follows later.

2. Site updates

Old stale sites that sit on the web for 12 months are not considered as relevant as sites that are updated monthly or weekly. Even if you make small changes it still helps. Making changes to a page somewhere deep inside your site will be less obvious than changing text on your home page though.

3. Meta tags

These are tags that go into every page of the site and which are used behind the scenes by the search engines. I often write these for clients, but the best practice would be for clients to write these themselves, since they understand what potential clients might search for. Every page should have it’s own tags. Google penalizes duplicate tags and Google Webmaster tools sends me notifications of duplicates.

The tags that are used are the title tag, the description tag and the keywords tag.

The title tag is what you read in the blue bar at the top of the screen when you are viewing a web page. It should not be too long and could possibly contain the site name, page name and one or two key words or phrases.

The description tag is often the paragraph you see below a search result in Google and should also not be longer than two lines of text. It can be the same as the first paragraph on the page, but should communicate your message, hook the reader and contain keywords.

The keyword tag contains many words separated by a comma each. These words are ignored to some extent by many search engines, but still have their place. I recommend 10 to 20 keywords. More isn’t always better. It is possible to put whole phrases there which means that if someone searches for that exact phrase it counts in your favour. Don’t repeat the same word more than 4 times though.

The final and most important factor to keep in mind when writing these tags is that the content of the page and the words in ALL 3 tags should all be related. They won’t have any effect unless they seem truly credible and unless the page really contains that content prominently.

Once again, I encourage my clients to write these themselves since they understand what clients might search for in their industry.

4. In-links

This is probably THE most important factor once the others are all in place. Google rates the importance of your site by looking at how many people link to you, how good the sites are that link to you, and what text is used to link to you.

If you have a page about “Potatoes in Pretoria” which has good content, has that phrase in all the meta tags, has links with that text pointing to it from other pages in your site, and has 50 other websites linking to that page, all using the words “Potatoes in Pretoria” for those links, chances are that page will do VERY well if someone searched for that. Whether someone will search for that phrase is another matter all together.

If there is another page on another site, which is also about “Potatoes in Pretoria” which has 100 links to it with that link text, that page will most probably appear higher than your page for the same search. Links from sites related to your industry will be better than links from unrelated sites.

How do you get these links?

Create a page on your site for links. I usually call it “resources” since Google doesn’t value pages called “links” very much for obvious reasons.

The page should be linked on your home page and many other pages, but the link can be at the bottom of the page. It is mostly there for search engines. Do not worry too much about people reading it. Most people do not click on small text links at the bottom of the page.

Do not just put a bunch of links on this page. Make sure that each link has a description that goes with it. If you have a page with many links but no text, it will look suspicious and Google will not be likely to index it.

Ask people you know, or sites you find on Google if they wish to exchange links with you. Attempt to do this with popular high quality sites with a Page rank of 1 or more out of 8. Sites with a Page rank of 0 might be blacklisted unless they are brand new and linking to blacklisted sites will count against you. If someone agrees to link to you, politely ask if they can use the link text and description you supply.

You can vary the text used for the link, but the more you have for one phrase, the better your page will do for that phrase in search results.

You can’t start building link exchanges before your site is active. People would like to see what they are linking to. They might also be sceptical about linking to you before your Page rank is above 0.

Conclusion

Provide a clear indication of what you want on your site as well as how you might want it structured and what you would like on each page, e.g. content, an area for specials etc. If you have any idea what kind of look you would like, provide that too. Find examples of sites you like that could influence your site’s design.

Give your designer any logos, images, brand images and brand identity information before the process starts. Try to have all your content finalized and proof-read as soon as possible, otherwise it is possible that you might rush this phase and end up having to correct mistakes later.

Provide the meta tag information if you wish to get the best results. Not all companies have time to do this so it is sometimes necessary for the designer to take the initiative in such cases and make some decisions on their part.

For a fee I can Provide these SEO services for a client’s website. It is quite a time-consuming process and, depending on the client’s needs, can range in cost from R350 per month to R1000 per month. The client will still need to inform me which keywords they think are good to target. I can then research that further and seek a solution.

If you found this article useful you should also read my articles called How to write website content and make sure your design works and More thoughts you should have before starting a website

Here are some of the topics I cover in this article:

1. Should everyone have a website?
2. Does a website need a marketing campaign?
3. Can you update a site yourself?
4. How will site statistics be tracked?
5. Do you already have a domain name and/or hosting service?

I was planning on writing about the basics of doing Search Engine Optimization for your web site this week, when I saw an interesting article on Site Pro News entitled “10 Questions to Ask Yourself
Before Designing a Website” written by Herman Drost.

Given that this ties in with my previous article on creating website content I have decided to post some comment on a few interesting points he made, in order to discuss this topic in some more depth. If you have not read my previous article, here it is How to write content for your website and make sure your design works.

1. Should everyone have a website?

The article does mention various ideas like making sure you know the purpose of your website and what you will be selling. Some of these seem almost redundant, but are still worth a mention. My opinion is that every company everywhere should have a website. It helps people to locate your service. I have often tried to reach a company that I know of, only to find that they have no website. That is business that they are losing. I would rather look for someone who has a site than open the yellow pages. It is the reality of the post-Googleworld we live in.

However, if you wish for your site to attract new customers, it is very important that your site is not just a relic sitting on a server somewhere containing the information you wrote 3 years ago and unchanged since.

2. Does a website need a marketing campaign?

The web needs an active marketing campaign like any medium.The campaign might not cost a cent, but time has to be spent on updating content, running a blog, or advertising your site through paid and free advertising on the web. Free advertising might include being active on blogs and forums in a way that attracts people to your business and to your expertise in the field. Also consider possibly having a Youtube channel with helpful videos etc. This can link back to your site.

Read my article coming in a week or two about Search Engine Optimisation to learn more about why updating your site is important and read my previous article to know how to structure that updated content effectively.

3. Can you update a site yourself?

Many clients wish to update their sites themselves to save costs. While I support this concept I have found that in most cases it does not work. Unless a client is making changes every second day or more often than that it is not such a great idea. Common ways to support this is to use a free online CMS(Content Management System), or to set up a blog(usually a WordPress blog).

Most clients tend to forget how to use the web interfaces for a CMS, or blog. The result is that the client will need to contact the developer, or designer in order to ask them how it works, or to ask them to do it for them. This defeats the purpose since the developer, or designer will bill you for that time and they will have to use a method of updating that actually takes them longer to use.

The drawbacks to using an online CMS is that it can take a very long time to make changes on various pages. In my experience this is frustrating for large scale updates, but great for small tweaks by clients.

So generally I find that paying a designer like me a small retainer to make changes, that are written and email-ed by the client, the most effective and productive way of keeping a site up to date.

4. How will site statistics be tracked?

It is important to track the number of visits a web page receives in order to keep it effective and do market research. New tools such as Google Analytics and Google webmaster tools allow us to view which search-keywords visitors use to reach the site and what countries they come from. Some services will even make suggestions about optimising your site’s HTML.

With regard to these services I feel the same way as I feel about clients updating their sites themselves. If a client is using this information daily it is worthwhile for them to do it themselves, but if a client only wants to check this information once or twice a year, it is better to pay the designer a retainer to mail them the screen shots they need. The chances of the designer having to instruct the client on how to do it are formidable and in most cases the designer will charge the client for that time. Clients often expect “little services” like these to be free, but at the end of the day no designer can make a living if they have many clients asking for services like these for free.

5. Do you already have a domain name and/or hosting service?

This is quite a simple question, but I have had many clients who are not sure. And in many cases clients who do have these in place can’t tell me whether the service includes PHP support, or other information that could influence the design process.

All things considered, the designer probably knows more about which services are inexpensive and provide the tools you and they need for the job. Even with a fee the designer might add for registration and time spent on admin, it is probably worth your while to let them sort out that part of the service.

Conclusion

Keep these points in mind when getting a site built and designed and when planning your site in order to help you run a successful site and reach your goals. Subscribe, or check back for my article about Search Engine Optimization within the next 2 weeks.

If you have not read my previous article, here it is How to write content for your website and make sure your design works.

Providing text and information to your website designer can be a tricky and a new experience for most. Here are some rough guidelines to make sure you get the most for your money and save time and energy for everyone involved.

1. Keep your text brief and to the point.

People don’t read long pieces of information on the web anymore. Thanks to Twitter, Google, Facebook and other services, people have the attention span of half a gold fish. Blogging is a huge exception. Blogs are not the same as targeted business websites.

A good rule of thumb is to have columns that are about 7 words wide and to keep your info to 3 paragraphs, or to bulleted point. The bullet system is even better since it gets to the point fast.

You can always include a “read more” link and make another page with your marathon document. Try to keep that short too though. Only the buyer who is burning to buy will read anything longer than a page of text and even that is pushing it.

2. Make sure you know what you want before the designer receives it.

Many website clients across the world tend to vaguely indicate content in the beginning of the project and start changing things once they get the first designs back.

The fact is that you are wasting your own time, energy and sometimes money by doing that. You are in fact also weakening your product.

The designer designs the site around the content you give him/her. If you add extra bits and pictures later it means the designer has to squish it into the previous design somewhere and, unless they billed you double, this will take a toll on your product. It is an exception if something was designed like a gallery, or blog which was intended to be expanded later.

Make sure your documents are proof-read and organised before handing them over. If a designer receives many e-mails asking to fix one word here and one word there the chances are that he/she will get it wrong and time and money will be wasted.

3. Keep photos to a reasonable amount.

No client is going to scroll through 50 photos. Make the images functional. The designer might help here, but provide the necessary tasteful images (not the ones your nephew took with his cell phone, unless he happens to be a professional) and make sure they all have a practical use. Sometimes some extra photos work nicely in a decorative bar at the bottom but there still needs to be a practical function for them.

Stick to these guidelines and you will certainly ensure a smoother project flow which will keep everyone smiling.

People often ask me why artists draw nude figures… And I’ve google that question and heard what Female artists with PHD’s on the subject have to say and their answer suck… e.g. because once you can draw the human form you can draw anything”… What?!

That’s as rediculous as saying “when you can sing classical music you can sing anything”. Believe me, I sang classical music for 5 years… It aint true.

Anyhow, back on topic.
Why most artists do it: Essentially I think artists do it because it’s tradition. How did it start? Well, when only the rich could afford paintings, it most certainly was porn. Yes it’s true… Royalty has always thought that they had the right to choose what they see and how they react, while the common man had to be censored. So porn paintings were pretty main stream. Since then it has changed somewhat, but I am sorry to say, unless someone has a better theory, nude art is basically based on the tradition of porn way back when.

Why I do it: I have decided to add a revision… that is my opinion about the general practice of drawing nudes and why colleges etc do it. My personal reasons: Because I love the human form. I love comic drawings, I love drawing people moving, I love capturing emotions and feelings in the same form. The human body has infinite expression and depth… well, maybe not infinite, but more options than my brain can count…

So i draw nudes as a further appreciation and study of that emotion and form that I appreciate. I love it in any form of photograph, or artwork featuring a person. Not to mention my love of dancers and the human body in motion.

Some of my nude artworks can be found here: Art

and here: Portfolio

An observation by a Freelance Designer: Outsourcing to design companies and design firms often means you get taken for a ride and lose your money. Here are a few reasons to use freelance designers. The following is my perception after working at a few different design/media firms.

Here are the reasons in short. Find the extended explanations below.

1. Freelance designers are less expensive
2. You do not know who a design company employs lately
3. Freelance designers tell it to you like it is
4. Communication with a freelance designer is direct
5. Freelancers don’t juggle your job as much
6. Freelance graphic designers will try to impress the heck out of you

1. Freelance designers are less expensive

This might sound blatantly obvious, but let me explain why it is so important. If you read my article about ” Why do graphic designers like me freelance” you will see that I mention some facts about what percentage of money a worker receives. A freelance designer (or any other kind) might charge you a large sum of money for a job, but I can almost guarantee that a company or firm will charge you at least double what the designer is asking. The simple answer is that the company pays the designer less than his freelance fee, but they also do need to make about 60 to 90% on top of that in order to stay in business.

2. You do not know who a company employs lately

If you insist on using a company, do a THOROUGH background check and check the current state of their business. I have often seen design companies charging REDICULOUS fees for video editing projects right after they have hired a new designer who has just started editing video. This is blatantly dishonest for a start and means that you pay for the quality the company has provided in the past (which might be years ago), but only receive the services of a new upstart designer. Often these are the same guys that will freelance for you for a whole month for a 3rd of the price of the 2 day video editing job that the design firm is charging you.

3. Freelance designers tell it to you like it is

Design company managers, or managers in general have too much psychological experience. Yes, you read that right. It might not make sense now, but think about it. A manager can usually win the client over with words of reassurance and little “white” lies. A freelance designer usually tends to tell you the truth about a project or job. They simply don’t have the same amount of smoke and mirrors in their arsenal to use against you.

4. Communication with a freelance designer is direct

When you ask a freelancer to do your job, you tell them what you want, they brainstorm, get your opinion and get on with the job. When you work with a design company, they listen to you, maybe take notes, and then explain the concept to the designer. The designer often has to brainstorm in near seclusion and with little feedback. I have seen this backfire many times. I have seen brilliant designers layout and entire magazine in a great style, only to have editorial shoot it down. Then after redo-ing the WHOLE magazine I have seen the client say that they wish to completely change it again… So that means the layout was done 3 times. Simple communication between a graphic designer and a client without the middle man would avoid this situation right from the start.

5. Freelancers don’t juggle your job as much

What I mean by this is that companies often have about 10 balls in the air at any time. And by “balls” I mean jobs from clients. This often means that you are paying for the time spent on other jobs. It is not uncommon for a design firm to charge you for the hours that the job was estimated to take by the designer, yet then only spend a fraction of the time on the job and make the poor designer overwork themselves to get 5 jobs out in the time span of 3 or 4 jobs. Freelance designers are simply less prone to working in this way.

They want their work to look good and get return business, so they will put in the hours they planned to (and often quite a few extra) just so that they can be proud of the product and get a good reputation. After all, word of mouth is still the best advertising you can get. Design firms usually ask monthly fees to maintain websites and software. I have often been aware of design firms who charge a big client more money every month than it takes to pay ALL of the employees that are under management. That means that they can almost run the ENTIRE company on the money they get from one client… often for only 10 hours of work per month; Never mind all the other jobs they juggle.

6. Freelance graphic designers will try to impress the heck out of you

Trust me. Freelancers don’t want to keep looking for new clients each time they need work. They want to build strong relationships with several core clients and get more than one job from them. In fact, they will do backflips for you if it means a steady flow of work. Freelancers also want you to refer them to your friends and colleagues. So they really are going to go over an above the call of duty to impress you and let you know how much they appreciate the work.

Freelance graphic design is my preferred occupation. I am a graphic designer living in Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa and this is a short overview of freelance graphic design. In the field of graphic design freelancing is the dominant trend. Unlike many other fields freelancing is simply the only way to get ahead in graphic design.

Computer programmers etc. might be able to get very high-paying jobs working for companies, but graphic design is like fine art… The term Fine artist is synonymous with freelance fine artist. It simply is the same thing. I think that all occupations have some high-paying office jobs, but they can be few and far between. I even know people who could work in an office and get paid times more than they are making on their own. Some people favour freedom though.

It has been said that a freelance graphic designer can only work for 15 years before retirement. Whether this is true or not, it certainly is true that freelancing in any occupation, including graphic design can be extremely stressful. If a practitioner of freelance graphic design wishes to retire and have money, or even make an amount of reasonable profit, it is advisable that he or she be the boss or the “big dog” so to speak.

In my experience an employer will usually make about 15 to 20 times the hourly rate of the employee. In other words, if you are working for an employer you take 10% to 20% of the money that comes in and the employer takes the rest. Whether they put that in their pockets, or back into company expenses and development is their business though.

This does not mean that your boss or their boss is out to get you. Everyone is in business to make money and the heads take all the financial risk, so they reap the benefits. It would however indicate that freelancing as a graphic designer is the only way to make a decent income, unless you are still learning the ropes of the trade. An in-house graphic designer is often about as glorified as a secretary or maybe a middle-management employee, and the opportunities of job advancement in the in-house graphic design field are few.

Unlike a secretary who becomes an assistant, then a middle manager and possibly main management, graphic designers usually have no such options. There are a host of sites out there these days that are all dedicated to providing freelance graphic designers and keeping freelance graphic designers posted about freelance graphic design opportunities.

It is a big field and these sites often specialize in certain areas of graphic design. Freelancers and designers can fill in their information and their area of expertise within the graphic design market. There are also many new marketing opportunities for freelance graphic designers. The web is a major new source of freelance work and is the perfect medium for freelance graphic designers to get their work looked at by prospective clients. New social media tools such as Facebook or Twitter can also play a part in marketing of a freelance graphic design venture.

In rescent times I have even heard tales of artists and designers getting hired by large famous firms because smeone at the company spotted their work on Youtube or another online source.

If you are in an industry which allows you to work for yourself, I think we all owe it to ourselves to at least try and get out work out there and attempt to forge our own paths.

If all graphic designers had to fit the text book definition of the term perfectly we (graphic designers) would all be magicians who could jump through rings of smoke and make multimedia artworks appear with the wave of a mouse and the words “abracadabra”. In reality most graphic designers are only informed about a few parts of the graphic design field. Graphic design has become a multimedia field.

The reality is that the field consists of:

• Illustration (digital or fine art illustrations including painting)
• magazine layout and book layout (what you find on the shelves of bookstores and super markets)
• textile design (carpets, materials and upholstery)
• print design and advertisement design (concepts for advertising campaigns and silkscreen printing for clothing)
• interface and web design (design and coding of websites and interface designs for software development and planning)
• video effects and editing (shooting and editing of corporate video and commercial video as well as special effects and animation)
• 3d modeling and animation (Creation and animation of 3 dimensional models like Shrek), and many other fields.

All of the above is considered to be Graphic Design.

Most graphic Designers will attempts to know as possible about all areas. Some have partners and friends that they often refer to for assistance with big Multimedia graphic design jobs. It is however not possible to be an expert on every field.

Graphic design is a term that is used in association with commercial art for the most part. It involves splicing together a multimedia concoction of art, computer skills, digital imagery, design concepts, advertising concepts, type, copyright, video material and more.

All the things we see around us contain elements of graphic work. People have asked me whether there is any work in my field. There are dozens of designers being churned out by most schools all around the country every year. Yet the market does not become saturated.

The following contain graphic design work:

• tv ad
• poster
• bus ad
• magazine
• kitchen appliance logo
• sweets wrapper
• bottle label
• bookmark
• many clothing item

You see these items around you every day ,which contain work done by designers. Is it any wonder that it is a field with so much work out there? Getting the work is a different story alltogether though. It is surprising to find that the field is often not valued as a skill in the way many other jobs are.