Website Design

I’ve been working with my design company this week and have come to the conclusion that I want to get rid of some employees and go up on my prices. The idea behind it is that rather then try and do 100 websites at $550.00 a piece to make $5,500.00 per month cut the bills down around $3,000.00 and sale one website at $3,000.00. If we do 3 websites a month we only have to deal with 3 customers and the last two are total profit.

The benefit for the customer is that my whole office is dedicated to their project for the whole month and their time is not split between other clients. The problem with this is that I’ll have to market my business differently from the way I’ve been marketing it. At this time we get most our customers from forums and blogs.

My site has some pretty good rankings but no were near what I’ll need for a project like this one. I’ve put some thought into what would be the best keywords and search engines to rank on and have come to the conclusion that Google is not going to be the best search engine to rank on. I need traffic that will convert into to sales and I’m thinking that MSN is going to be the place to get that traffic.

I guess my first step is going to be figuring out how to make my site rank on MSN.

I’ve also been playing with some blogs and they don’t seem to rank as easily as I’d hoped so I’ll be creating pages for this project.

I’ve been playing with a new tool that allows me to check out the competitions websites and see how well they rank and I was disappointed in a lot of the so called experts and a lot of the blogs that I checked out.

But I’ll be using that tool to decide which keyword is the best one to rank my website homepage for. If anyone is interested in this project then I’m interested in everyones opinion on my website design, best search engines to rank on, how to rank on them, best ways to get traffic, my text (which will be changing as soon as I find my new keyword for the home page and how to rank on MSN) and anything else that might help out.

I’ll be posting everything I’m doing here as I do them as well as in my blog.

Guess it’s time to go to work.

I decided to do a little test now that my blog is optimized for the search engines. I wrote some text about custom website designs and I’m going to try and rank it for custom website design.

Here’s my thinking.

If the blog ranks well then I’m able to make a list of keywords and write articles about each of my keywords and rank those keywords in the top ten. But I guess step one is seeing how long it takes to rank my blog post in the top ten for custom website design.

I’ve decided to do a little search engine optimization on some of my blogs. I found a lot of information but very little information that told me where to go and what to do. Because of this I decided to start a list of some of the things I’ve done and how I went about doing them. The blog I’m using is WordPress.

If you log into WordPress and click on options, then click on Permalinks you will be taken to a page that allows you to change the way your url’s are shown. It’s best to do this in the beginning stages of starting your blog because once you change the way your url’s are shown, you will loose all incoming links going to your current pages.

You have three chooses, the first is the default setting, the second shows the date and title name and the third is a custom setting. I used the third and placed /%postname%/, this shows the title of my post in all the url’s and nothing else. I’m not sure if this was the best way, if I duplicate a post title I’m not sure what will happen. The second option might have been the better option but I did not want the dates in my url.

Next problem I saw was with the title of my pages, I downloaded the blog and went to the wp-content folder, then to the themes folder and then picked the template I was using. From here I went to the header.php page and changed the title to only show the title of my post but later found a post by bj that had this code

So I changed it to this.

After this I downloaded a plugin called SH-Autolink, I’m still playing with this but it looks like a pretty neat tool. Lets say I want certain keywords to link to information about those keywords. I can tell the blog that every time it sees the keyword PageRank it needs to link to an article that explains PageRank.

I cheated a little and made it link to my website design site every time it sees the words website design but that does seem to be the most important site for someone looking for a website design company to me. (-:

I’m still playing but these are the changes I’ve made so far and I thought someone might be able to use this, so I posted it here.

There are a lot of misconceptions going on about how to start making money with a new or even an old site. I’ll pretend like we’re talking about a new site but the idea would be the same if it was an old site. Let’s pretend that we have a quality design, a good product and everything online is 100% ready to go. Now we need the traffic.

Let’s pretend that we are selling car parts and I have all my car parts in stock and ready to go. I have a 68 ford mustang left hand door skin, if I rank this part for the keyword car, then I’ll get people looking for new cars, car pictures, car dealers, used cars and the list goes on and on. That would be a waste of bandwidth, time and energy for me; I will not sell this part to someone looking for a new car or someone that does not even own a Mustang.

A little common sense tells me that I need to sell this to someone who is looking for a 68 Ford Mustang left hand door skin. I notice that I have a red one, blue one and a black one. I’m going to take my blue one and create a page named blue-mustang-door-skin.

On this page I’m going to write up some text about my 68 Ford Mustang Blue Door Skin. I’ll use the words 68 Blue Ford Mustang Door Skin at the start of my article, in the text, at the end of my article, in bold, in header tags, in plural and singular words and I’ll use those words together and separate from each other and in links coming and going from this page and most importantly, I’ll use them in my page title.

I’ll also have pictures of my Blue 68 Ford Mustang Door Skins that are optimized and set up for the search engines. They will rank if someone does a search in images for a 68 Blue Mustang Door Skin and they will rank if someone does a search in the organic engine for 68 Blue Mustang Door Skin because this is a non-competitive search term. I’ll have a call to action that will take my visitor to my shopping cart when he is ready to make the purchase.
On this page I’ll have links on the left hand side that will link to a page called Door Skins, 68 Red Mustang Door Skins, 68 Black Mustang Door Skins and the list will go on and on pointing people to different model and ages of cars that I have door skins for.

I’ll do this for every part and product that I’m selling. Once I finish, I will send out press releases about my new site, about my products and then I’ll write articles about my products and link those back to my products with the proper anchor text. I’ll submit these to article websites; I’ll then find car forums and start posting in those and use my signatures to link back to my product pages. I’ll create a blog and forum on my site to talk about my business and products and link to my products from that blog every chance I get. I’ll write post in my blog that we get others to link back to my blog.

I’ll create small sites like a 68 Ford Mustang website where I’ll give information and have a little forum for people that are interested in 68 Ford Mustangs to post. I’ll use this website to link to my products and help promote my main site. Once it’s going good I’ll create a new forum for 69 Ford Mustang lovers.

I could go on and on, I’ve not even started writing yet, there are so many ways to make money online.

It will take me some time and a lot of work but I will dominate the market that I’m in.

Content is an important part of any search engine optimization campaign because each article we write is another way for the search engines to find us. The more articles we write, the more words that are used and the more search results we will show up in.

With the current blogging software we are able to easily write articles and post them on our sites, once the articles have been posted the software can be set up to ping other sites to let them know something fresh has just been added to our site. This means instant traffic every time we add something new to our website along with the added benefit of traffic down the road as the search engines pick up the pages and rank them.

It’s not necessary that the content be well written when it comes to ranking on the search engines but well written content can have the added benefit of people linking to it and being picked up by bookmarking sites like Digg and many others.

There is always a downside to everything and here is the downside to this.

As more and more people begin writing fresh new content there will be more pages for the search engines to index. This will cause more competition as well as causing the search engines to start moving old text out of the way for the new. This means that good fresh well written content will be more important then ever as time roles on.

If you don’t have a blog it might be a good time to start one.