… lets talk SEO and integrating it into your business. Everybody seems to think that SEO is just about tweaking some meta data or doing other black magic in the interwebs! That’s simply not true. SEO is fundamentally aligned with PR these days. Getting your name out in the right, high value places. It’s about making sure that your site features content which is relevant to your audience and that it is structured in the right way. Ensuring that you get the maximum benefit from your site architecture.

Every small business or web developer needs to remember a few key things when they are thinking about conducting an SEO campaign. SEO isn’t just about ranking your website for that one ‘hero term’ that you have in your mind, it’s about ensuring that your site is receiving the most relevant and the highest converting traffic. It’s also about conducting thorough research and applying some best practice principles over time.

The most important thing is to make sure that your SEO campaign aligns with your business goals. Traffic or rankings are not a goal. Think about all of the different actions which you can assign a value to.

**Contact form submission

**Watching a Video

**Product Purchase

**Email Subscription

These kinds of things enable you to track the overall ROI of your search campaign far more effectively than if you simply had a goal of ‘get me to #1 for cars’

The more time you invest in SEO, the greater the benefits will be. There are no shortcuts (well, none which aren’t guaranteed to get you banned at some point…), so you need to be patient and choose a reputable company who doesn’t make crazy claims with large numbers. Just like anything, if it sounds too good to be true it generally is!

This is an excerpt from a facebook posting by Kristen Holden, at sitepoint.com

Sometimes making a few simple changes to your site can significantly improve your SEO and rankings in the search engines. (1) Your title tag is one of the most important items to optimize. The title tags on all your webpages should be keyword rich and different for each page and be reflective of the content and keywords on that particular page. (2) The meta description tag is another important item. It should also be a unique keyword rich summary of the content of each different page on your site. (3) Also… be careful to remove or update any and all bad links on your site. Having bad links will negatively impact your site.

To see some of my website work visit my site at: mathewsondesign.com/web.html

Recent studies in advertising show that ads that are more personalized get a better response. An ad in a magazine that has a nice photo of the business owner will usually always get a better response than a competing ad without that type of personal touch. The same thing seems to be true for avatars. It is now recommended that you personalize your business identity online when social networking, etc. by combining your logo with your photo in your avatar. The old methods of marketing with just a logo alone are changing. Here is what I did with my avatar:

Since successful branding and visual identity are of such primarimportance to most enterprises, I wanted to share some thoughts that may be helpful and add a little insight. First, a little history… It is thought that Peter Behrens, the German artist, architect and designer, was the first designer to create a comprehensive visual-identification program for a company called AEG back around 1907. This is what the logo looked like for this company. Later on, corporate identity and visual systems began to evolve after World War II when graphic design began to be seen as a major way to shape a company’s reputation for quality and reliability. Such firms as Olivetti Corporation and Columbia Broadcasting Systems hired strong individual designers, such as Giovanni Pintori and William Golden, who put their personal imprint upon their client’s designed image. Their attempts were very successful and other company’s followed suit.

As a result today the logo has generally become the most important element in a company’s visual identity program or branding scheme. Most existing and potential clients recognize their company and company’s product(s) by their logo and it’s associated branding scheme. A good logo or symbol must be memorable and have “some barb to it that will make it stick in your mind”. At the same time it must be “attractive, pleasant and appropriate. The challenge is to combine all these things into something simple.”

*special thanks to Phillip B. Meggs, author of A History of Graphic Design, and Tom Geismar (of the noted firm Chermayeff & Geismar Associates)

* you want your next professional printing project to turn out right
* your logo lacks excitement and/or needs to be updated
* you are planning a new marketing campaign, annual report, catalog or brochure
* you need a well coordinated business stationery package, i.e. bus cards, letterheads, envelopes, labels, invoices & other forms
* you are going to create a new website or upgrade an older one
* you need new signs – small or large and of any type, i.e. neon, electric, posters, billboards, truck lettering, interior sign systems, banners, etc.
* you have a custom calligraphy project
* you are writing/editing a book, booklet or pamphlet which you intend to print or publish
* you need to update or create a new brochure
* you are planning on creating an ad of any size to put in a local newspaper or publication, or in a major magazine
* you want to do an online email ad campaign and need to create an HTML emailer
* you need new graphics or custom graphic elements for your website
* you need animated flash graphics for your website or online ad campaign

When choosing the fonts or typography for a new project, experience has taught me to be careful & selective, maybe even what you would call conservative. One or two fonts, carefully selected, are usually all you need. Only in rare occasions, and depending on the project, will you need another font. This is because the goal in most projects is to create a harmonious whole with all the elements used. Using too many fonts generally creates a feeling of disunity and confusion. And I’ve found that you can still be very creative while remaining within these boundaries.