Design & SEO?

When I first began laying the foundation for AS|ONE Clothing I, like the majority of today’s generation, felt that the most important first step was creating a web prescence. Being that I had minimal funds and felt that they were better spent on developing product, I decided to embark on the creation myself. I had some experience working with the internet so I figured the task would take time but it was very possible. Creating a presence on the internet would allow me a low cost method for just “getting the name out there”, right? Well yes and no. Yes your name will be out there, somewhere, lost in the billions of other pages that make up the world wide web. And no because all though the name might be “out there” so to speak, chances are it is not what you had in mind. Going on two and a half years since www.asoneclothing.com made it’s debut on the www it is nowhere near what I had envisioned. Yes I personally have made leaps and bounds when it comes to web design and SEO, but I look back and wish that I would have gone about it a bit differently.

For those of you that may have the money to invest in a professional web designer but are having mixed feelings about parting with the cash I want you to seriously consider you decision. If creating a web presence is an plays an integral part in the future of your business and you are not already web savvy then my suggestion to you is go for the pro. Yes you may save a ton of cash by learning to do it yourself, but you also may spend a ton of time before you are good enough to make your website stand out on the web. Time that could have been better focused on your strong suits like developing product and marketing the brand.

Now for those of you that are like me and are dead set on doing it yourself either because you do not have the money or you are just stubborn and have a hard time letting others do the work for you. (I tend to be both.) I can not stress the importance of really taking the time to learn everything you can related to creating a web presence and carefully planning your course of action. By taking the time to learn everything I am not only referring to creating the structure and design, I am speaking of the inner workings of having your page found and indexed. This is actually a bit hard for me to say, as I tend to really enjoy the coding and design, but I feel that learning how to market and have your page found is a bit more important at this point. Why? Because like I have read time and time again, you can create the most beautifully functional page on the internet but if no one knows about it than it may as well not exist when it comes to running a business on the web. Get your page found first and then you can worry about keeping them there with your amazing design abilities.

Here is just a few of the things that I suggest you pay special attention to when creating your internet plan.

Google: Whether we like to admit it or not Google is on of the most important factors in having your web page found. Take the time to learn about how they crawl your site and what they look for. Pay close attention to things like, tags, titles, keywords, content and incoming links. These are the elements that create page rank. Learn about analytics, adwords and even adsense. Google has a ever expanding list of useful tools and they don’t look like they’ll be going anywhere any time soon.

Blogging: Learn about it, it’s not the be all end all for getting your site listed but it can be a very useful tool. The inner workings of blogging itself can give you volumes of information even if you don’t plan to incorporate a blog.

Social Networking and Bookmarking: Get to know these sites, they are some of the most visited on the net and they can be a big help in getting you found. Hang out and pay attention to the order of things. Watch how people interact and what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable. Learn what it takes to get people interested enough to deem you a useful member of the community. If you eventually make use of sites like these it is important that you know where you stand so that you don’t get booted for spamming your first day around.

Analytics Software: You need to understand how and why your visitors are getting to your site, why they view the content they do and most importantly why they leave. I personally make dual use of Statcounter and Google Analytics on a variety of my sites. The knowledge you can pull from all the fancy graphs and numerical tables is indispensable.

Site Submission: There are a ton of search engines and directories out there, do some research to find the ones that are necessary, the ones that will give you a boost and the ones that may hurt your chances.

Blogs in your niche: There are blogs out there for just about every niche you can think of, find a handful of them that relate to your product or service and visit them often. Look for the type of posts are frequent and the ones that seem to attract the most attention. Getting someone to write up an article on your site, product or service can be a great way of obtaining some zero cost advertising. Don’t be afraid to get involved here, add a few comments of your own, but again be sure that you are adding something that is actually useful to the readers. And DON’T SPAM, it’s irritating to have to go through and moderate a bunch of advertisements, trust me.

Last but not least Design. I put this at the end because it is so important to retaining your visitors. Get out there on there and do some research on design and functionality. Check out sites like cssbeauty.com for some design inspiration. Or head over to Sitepoint for volumes of info on both. Learn what it takes to keep your readers clicking and make it pleasing to the eye.

Well I do hope that this gives you a good point to start from when setting out to create your own internet presence. Please feel free to visit my del.icio.us page for tons of info on everything I have covered.

Tagged as: , Blogging, Design, google tools, SEO, web design