Author: photoadmin

What is custom web design

If you are concerned with getting local search results, the best thing to start with is a custom website that is built specifically for your market. Custom websites are no longer just about capturing your branding online. There is no need for a branded website if it doesn’t show up in your customer’s search results. We build our websites with your target market as a priority and your branding as a guide. All of our custom sites are fully SEO’d, down to the server we put it on.

Did you know that the download speed of your website is also a major factor in your search engine placement? Most hosting services don’t allow for optimal SEO due to the fact that it’s probably shared hosting. We can explain more when you call us.

The difference between a custom website and using a website builder services can be the difference between getting results and paying a lot of money in the future to SEO the impossible. Most website builders allow you to add keywords and metadata, but that’s not full SEO. If you’re using a template, they’re often filled with extra lines of code to explain the features of the template to anyone who’s using it. That code could slow your results. And with a site builder service and with templates, there are many other websites out there that look just like yours. Is that what you need?

Call us today for a free consultation and quote. Stand apart from the crowd!

How to use Pinterest for marketing your business

With the amount of technology we use, the amount of Television and movies our society consumes, it is no wonder that a social media site like Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites out there. Tapping into the popularity of Pinterest can be a great business tool.

What is Pinterest?
It is an online pin board where users can “pin” photos of things that they like or find useful from the web. Their friends will see their pins and they can comment on them, like them, and even re-pin on their own account. Users categorize their pins in what ever way they choose as a way of organizing their pins.

Why should I use Pinterest for my business?
Because of the way Pinterest is organized, the pins themselves are indexed by search engines. When you start an account for your business and start pinning your products or services in an interesting or unique visual way, your content will be indexed, has the potential to go viral, and you are boosting your social media score with Google.

Be Unique
Your pins should be quality photos or images and unique in some way. For an example, if you sell beauty products, your pins should be more than just photos of your products. Take before and after photos of your anti-aging serum. Take a series of how-to photos demonstrating the latest eye shadow trend.

What if your business is strictly a service? Think of your target market and the things that they are interested in. For example, if you are a counselor and your target market is married couples. Think of stress reliever tips that you can write up on an interesting background and pin on your boards. People love to pass around sayings.

Set up your tools
The greatest asset of social media is passing information. The biggest “miss” of users of social media is not anchoring their information. With Pinterest, the things you share have to be anchored to a website rather than uploaded to Pinterest (like you can do with Facebook). The best thing you can do for your business is have a blog area where you upload your photo – and an article to go with it, then to pin it to your account. Now when ever someone re-pins or clicks on your pin, they have the option to follow the pin all the way back to your website.

Free Website Builders

Ever hear the phrase “free is never really free?” If you are looking into building your business website with a free website builder site, this article will help you understand what you are really building. It’s better to build a free website with full knowledge of what you’re buying and what you can and can’t do with it.

Build a Website and Get Found
There is misleading information with the advertising of a few website builder sites. One very popular service gives the impression “Build it – get found.” (Actually most of these types of web builders give you this impression.) The truth is there is no software out there that will build you the perfect site that will suddenly give you search engine results. Most of these free services are pay-per-click partners, meaning they receive a commission when you sign up for the pay-per-click services through their website. The site will entice you with a credit for Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Google and Facebook are really hoping that you’ll keep using their ad services, and because you end up in the sponsored links area of a search (if you bid enough per click) the website builder can now say that you “get found.”

Google Ads are useful for people who have websites that do not receive high search engine results naturally. Bidding for clicks allows them the opportunity to have their web address compete with sites that have been designed better or have a higher Page rank. It can, however, be costly to outbid your competition, especially in competitive industries like insurance. If you are local insurance agent often your corporate office marketing department is bidding high dollar for the same local keywords that you are bidding on. Corporate is essentially competing with you for premium PPC spots. Your Free website can become a very expensive website in order for you to “get found.”

Time isn’t on your side
If you read the how-to articles and postings published by any search engine, they all say the same thing – it takes time for the search engine to index the billion new websites published each month. Ok, so it’s more like 50 million each month. The point is that there are too many websites waiting in line to be recognized by Google for their unique domain and content in a short amount of time. Within 6 months, you’ll know where the search engines are going to place you, for good or bad. If you’re in a niche market, you may get lucky and your natural search engine placement is within the top 40 sites for your keywords. This does not happen very often, but in theory, it could happen. The long wait for placement is another selling point for pay-per-click ads. If you bid enough, you’re immediately placed well in the sponsored links on the right hand side of the search results. If you don’t have a big PPC budget, patience is a virtue for website placement in a natural search, but don’t hold your breath for good results.

Nice Graphics and No Business
The big sell with any website builder service is a nice looking result. You are provided with professional looking graphics, quality images and stock photos, and usually a few special features that allow you to upload your own product images, logo, and unique content. The end result is an attractive website. But the catch is that you will have to market your website heavily in order to gain any measurable traffic. This means paying for web ads, paying to advertise your web address on all the rest of you marketing materials or spending hours online adding your website link to as many other websites as you can (you should be doing this last one regardless of how your site was created).

The biggest piece of advice I have for businesses that are wondering what to do about a website when their marketing budget screams “pick cheap!” Cheap can cost more in the end. The costs may not be felt as lost money, but the cost of not increasing your business with your website is a cost I consider more expensive. Just think of the number of customers that you can add when your website is found in searches for your type of product or service. Over a year’s time, the amount of money spent on pay-per-clicks is probably more than what a good SEO designer would charge for a custom website. You don’t need to spend thousands on a website that will perform in your target market.

If you find yourself in a situation where you absolutely do not have a budget for a website, take a look at creating a blog for your website. Most blogs are free and allow you to pick a template, change some basic colors and even upload your own header image in some designs. You can add pages at will, add photos, link to videos and more. Since no free service is perfect, the trade off is using the blog service’s name in your blog title. You could pay to have an original domain name redirected to your blog, or you can pay a designer to create a blog on your domain name, but that is assuming you had money to create your website in the first place.

Advantages to using a Blog Service
Search engines love blogs. Blogs are simple entities that are mostly text, and search engines love text. You will have better luck with search results if you use free blog software than you would using a free or low cost website builder. The two are constructed differently on the back end, but let’s not go into detail about that. Blogs are also expandable with thousands of free plugins that can add new features or functions to your site. If you’re a do-it-yourself’er, the more accustomed you get to marketing your website, the more you will learn and grow. And there are blogs about blogs so you will always have thousands of resources to help you learn more and do more.

If you need to go cheap, make sure you choose a website option that moves you toward you business goal. Cheap is never easy and can sometimes cost more in the end. Do your research, know your goals, and be educated about what you’re buying.

Copyright and trademark infringement and social media

Have you posted things in social media that you’ve copied from the internet and not give proper source credit?

Sharing other’s information is part of the fun of social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest. But how often do the credits of those things you share not come along with the post?

Copyright and trademark infringement is something to watch out for, especially when you’re posting for your business. Plagiarism is rampant on the web too. Are you guilty of copy and paste?

It is important to create your own content to share on social media, to brand your content, and to credit sources for other content that you may share. When you create your own content, you are increasing the probability that your own brand is shared virally. Yes there a many other businesses across the country that do what you do, but you are unique and the content you share should reflect that.

No more stock photos! Yes stock photos are good in a pinch, but they are resold millions of times. How many times have you seen the same photo you purchased for your post card on other people’s marketing materials? You loved the photo, but guess what, so did thousands of business owners and marketing managers. That’s why it was on the top of the list on the stock photo site… it sells like hotcakes!

Take your own photos! Be resourceful. Everyone has a family member that is good at taking photos, or if you don’t, call up the local college/trade school and get a student to come out and take photos for you. Make sure you plan your shots well. Get local folks to be your models, or ask the student to bring some of their friends. Again, plan. Find similar photos online and discuss your shoot at length with the photographer so you can get exactly what you want. Then the next time you post content online, it is your own content. This is time and money well spent. Take the time to stage your brand exactly as you want it.

Write your own copy!!!! This can’t be stressed enough. The most common mistake people make online is “borrowing” their copy from someone else. On our own website, we’ve had problems with our competitors lifting our content word for word and placing it on their website. Not good for many reasons. Even if you are a franchise and have the right to use the corporate site’s content, it is not a good idea to copy and past directly. And on social media, you really need to be careful about not giving credit to its proper source.

The obvious reason of legal action is one reason to write your own copy. But the other reason is content syndication on the web and search engines. Google reads your content and if there is other content that is exactly the same, it could jeopardize your placement. Search engines are built with a form of intelligence that can figure out which sites are simply copies of other sites. The copies and then some times the original website can receive lower ranking because they are copies. Google doesn’t like cheaters, and copies are cheating it its algorithms.

Trademark infringement is something to watch out for as you’re sharing info on social media. Memes are extremely popular, but be careful with what you share. Things that denigrate someone’s trademark or brand, even if they’re funny, are dangerous ground. There is a permanent record of who shared what online and it could hurt your brand in the end. Another way to think of trademark infringement is to think like Hollywood producers looking at product placement in their movie. Could that company come back to you and say “remove my logo from your advertisement/social media post/content because you are not representing our brand…” Trademark infringement is complicated and its best to avoid it.

Ideally, social media followers share your content, so creating your own content that is staged exactly as you want it benefits your business more than sharing other people’s content. The greatest benefit is pointing all of your content back to you. Sending out great photos that have your logo or website branded in them points people back to you. So no matter where the content goes, people will always know its origin. Stage your brand at every moment, especially your social media content!