Linked Up Design

Well it has been a few weeks now since I finished my site and I am starting to see some results with regards to the SEO work that I did on it. One of the main things that I have been working on is pushing up the sites ranking in my local area. This is being done more as an experiment to see if the higher SEO score is really paying off with regards to search engine rankings.

Well here are the results:

Google:

• First Page when you keyword search SEO Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Search Engine Optimization Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Website Design Rockaway NJ but this one is different and will explain later

Yahoo:

• First Page when you keyword search SEO Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Search Engine Optimization Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Web Design Rockaway NJ

Bing:

• First Page when you keyword search SEO Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Search Engine Optimization Rockaway NJ
• First Page when you keyword search Web Design Rockaway NJ

I first want to stress that I really don’t see a whole lot of website design companies in this area so this is not like competing in Manhattan but I would still say that these are good results considering that it has only been a few weeks. What are the likeliness that someone is going to type these keywords, I really don’t know considering the size of this area but when I start to see some real results I will let you know.

Second thing here is the use of directories and their effectiveness with SEO. In the section on Google above, I mentioned that I would explain this and here are the results. There was a page one ranking but this ranking was part of the directory for the area through Google. What was done was I went to Google and did a search for local directories which lead to Google’s Local Business Center. Using my Google account I was able to set up my business in a local directory hence giving it the ranking mentioned about. Why do this? Other then the obvious reason that it put me on the first page, first line so to speak, it is also creating back links for the site. This is something that I am going to spend some time working with in the future and will be writing about it more later. From there I have found several other directories that are free out there on the internet that I have signed up for and place my site on to as well as my clients.

Again, this is a work in progress. SEO work takes months to bit because of the sheer size of the internet and the real results will be how many clients I get from my site. I also do not want to limit myself to the town I live in so future work will be done on directories for the County and the State.

Linked Up Design

Well after a very exhausting week, I have managed to redo my site taking what I learned from the video on SEO that I watched on Lynda.com. And what was my reward? Well, I finished the site and loaded it up and then check on whois.sc and got back my score. Now to brag about this would be wrong but I will say that my score was very rewarding for my work.

One of the key things that I learned early with regards to SEO and building a site is this point: “You can’t design for SEO only, you have to design for the our potential clients, customers or readers, those of you that have blogs.” Personally I feel that is really the only way to go. To be more specific, if you look at my sites code, there is no H1 or H2 headers which anyone that knows about SEO will tell you has to be in. I ran in to some trouble with this when putting together my site because of the fact that design-wise this was not going to look good. My design was to have a site that got peoples attention quickly, while showing off some design tricks. Because putting in headers put a lot of space between the header and the paragraph, it would have not look right so I opted to not use them. This might or might now work.

Tools I used:

• First thing that did was homework and that was what took most of the time. I ran through Google’s Adword campaign to check on key words for print and web design as well as SEO. This was pretty easy because each of these words are “the” keywords. These are obviously in the Title, Keywords, Description & Meta Tags section of the site.
• From there it was working out the copy that I was going to use in the site so I handed this over to my partner who is our copywriter and we hashed out putting in these keywords in the copy but not in a way that was overwhelming in the site. In other words, we did not put things like, “SEO is great, you need SEO in order to improve your SEO score to get people to visit your Web Site!”
• Using some bold tabs here and there will also help in the long run.
• One thing that I put in as a keyword is my location, the reason being is that a bit later tonight I will be sending the URL to local directories in Google and Yahoo to help increase my marketing in my own area.
• From there I will submit my site to Google, Yahoo and Bing.
• Next it to put the site in to Directories and a few months from now I will see if this fancy score I got really paid off.

Do understand that just because I got a good score for the site, it does not end from there. The site needs to be built up as it only has about 4 pages and I do not have the delusion that I will be #1 in ranking in a few weeks, I am 35 miles from NYC so I don’t think that is going to happen. What I know will happen is that I will be able to reach people in my area now which is really more important then anything else!!

This blog entrance is the first in a series of test entries that I am doing in order to learn how to use WordPress 2.8. A bit about me, I have been doing graphic design since around 1993. Now I will be the first to admit that I was in and out  of the field for a number of years so this summer I took a crash 10 day course on

Just a test picture

InDesign, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash and Acrobat. This was very exciting for me being that it was my first experience with working on websites while getting updated with the changes of InDesign and Photoshop.

Since then I have started up Linked Up Design, a graphics and web design company. Being that I have only been working with web sites for a short time, I have found that there is a great big demand for WordPress to be incompassed in to existing websites so I have spent the last few days leaning how to use WordPress. I currently have a client that is looking to do just this so I am in crash course mood right now to first learn how WordPress works and then how to interacted it with Dreamweaver and use the blog system within my clients site. What we are putting together is going to be an interactive lawyer’s site. His idea is to be able to give out advice to people, with in the bounds, and then be able to attracted clients to him. WordPress seemed to be the most intelligent choice with its ability to work with in a website’s design. So we will see!!!