Free Website, Printing and Graphic Design Tips

Blogging, submitting articles to directories, creating a company page on Facebook and posting on Twitter are today’s top free marketing strategies. Publicize your business and increase your search engine rankings by taking advantage of these marketing venues.

The article directory of choice for me is http://ezinearticles.com/. I write up a 250 to 500 word article related to my business and of interest to my potential clients and then I submit it  to them. Registration is free and the process is very simple. Write about something of interest to your potential clients and be sure to include keywords (words and phrases potential clients will use to search for your products or services) in your article! Submitting an article including keywords in its content will make the article more like to be found via internet searches.

Create your Facebook and Twitter accounts  now! Registration is free for both these services and Facebook offers you the opportunity to create a company page. These are social network sites with huge audiences. Register for twitter at: http://twitter.com/ and to get a FaceBook company page visit: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. Before you create your facebook company page locate images of your company logo, samples of your work or products, etc. to upload during the page creation process. It’s very user friendly and goes quickly. Use these social networks to advertise your business through images, links to your website, and daily posts. The result can be more traffic to your site, more sales and consequently, increased search engine standings for your company website.

Blogging can increase exposure to your website, search engine ranking and sales. As you may have noticed, I like http://wordpress.org/. By the way, The New York Times, Yahoo and CNN use the service as well. It’s Free. It’s easy. It’s what you need to do. Blogging is simple, and doesn’t take a great deal of time.  You can post entries in your blog according to your schedule. Daily, once a week, even twice a month would be fine. Be sure to include a link to your website in your blog posts and add your blog link to your website.

Two major factors resulting in better search engine placement are relevent content and the correct use of keywords.

The importance of the relationship between keywords and content cannot be understated. Your keywords should appear in your content but please don’t “over do it”! Your site could be rejected by a search engine if you have too many keywords in a page’s content. Keep the percentage of keywords to between 5-10% of the page’s overall content. You should also keep the number of keywords in your code to somewhere around 20-25 words maximum. Too many keywords in the meta tag will dillute their value.
Content should be relevent and informative while including those all important keywords. Check you content and keep it current by updating it regularly. Finally, don’t forget to include a keyword or two in your page title and meta description section.

Here are a couple of hint to help you make your website even more “crawlable” by the search engines. Why? Because it’s the key to better search engine return ranking. You want people to find your site!
1. Spiders like html and lots of content related text. Keep the Flash but don’t go all Flash and use alt tags on your pictures. Make sure you have enough html and content related text to keep the spiders happy.
2. Include a sitemap in your website. Spiders love a good sitemap and ifyou’re not sure how to set it up, Google will give you all the help you need. Take a look at their Webmaster Tools.
3. Update you site. Putting up a website and never updating it is the wrong approach. The spiders want to crawl new stuff and your visitors want new reasons to return. Do yourself a favor and make the time to update your website.

Help improve your website’s search standing with Google.
It’s FREE and it’s by Google for you.

When you make use of Google’s Webmaster Tools you can:
1. Automatically inform Google when you update your pages
2. Discover your links and see how users are reaching your site
3. Enhance and increase traffic to your site
4. Learn more at Webmaster Central
(The above 4 items are taken from the Webmaster Tools page.)
Simply go to the page http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/ and click on get started or, if you prefer take a tour of the tools Google makes available to you for free. It’s a great resource for anyone maintaining their own website.