There are a number of websites that use blogs as a supplement to the primary content of the site. In fact, this website is an example. The primary purpose of the site is to offer design services and the blog helps to accomplish the overall objectives by driving more traffic to the site and increasing the exposure of the design services.

If you currently run a website that does not include a blog, you could be missing out on a number of key benefits. Here are 5 reasons to add a blog to your site:

1. Repeat Traffic – Blogs allow your interested visitors to subscribe by RSS or by email. If you are selling products or services through your site, most visitors will not buy on their first visit. In this case, the more repeat traffic you get, the more likely you are to make sales. Additionally, these repeat visitors will frequently become very loyal visitors and supporters of your business.

2. Inbound Links – Starting a blog is one of the best things you can do to gain new inbound links. Effective blog content creation will make your site a much more likely target of links from other websites and blogs.

3. Search Engine Traffic/Rankings – One of the great benefits of blogs is the keyword-rich pages that are created each time you publish a new post. If you post consistently to your blog you will quickly see a drastic increase in the total number of pages on your site. The more pages on your site, the more opportunities you’ll have for search engine traffic. With each blog post you can target different keywords and phrases that will expand the type of searches that will draw traffic.

4. Credibility/Authority – A blog is a natural way for you to show your expertise to your visitors. Top bloggers are seen as experts and authorities in their respective fields. If you want others to recognize you as one of the leaders in your industry, start a blog and show them why you are an authority. Gaining this status can help you land more business and allow you to charge higher rates.

5. Interaction with Visitors – Blogs allow readers to interact by participating in the comments. Active readers are more likely to come back.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES?

Location, location, location. If you had a retail outlet you wouldn’t set up shop where there’s no foot traffic, would you? Well, your customers and clients are already at social media Web sites. They’re on MySpace, they’re LinkedIn, and they have Facebook pages. They share photos at Flickr and upload family movies to YouTube. Bottom line is that you need to go to where your customers are.

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH SOCIAL MEDIA?

Don’t worry: every person and every business had to make a first, tentative step into the social media landscape.

Look: With so many social media sites out there, you may want to do some investigative work to find out where your best customers are. Since these sites offer free memberships, it only costs you in time to join multiple sites.

Listen: Once you’ve joined, listen to the conversations around you. Each site may have its own mores, but generally people don’t want you storming into a conversation to tell them how great your products or services are.

Join In: Once you feel comfortable with your surroundings, feel free to join in. Just don’t make it a sales pitch. Find a group that you can participate in. If you sell dog products, find and join dog lovers’ groups.

Start: If you’re feeling really daring, start your own group, and invite current clients and colleagues to join in. A real estate agent might start a group focused on the local area (restaurants, schools, taxes, etc.), getting local business owners and residents to join together.

HOW TO SUCCEED WITH SOCIAL MEDIA?

Succeeding in social media has everything to do with providing content for people to digest. It is not a straight forward relationship between client and business anymore. People don’t respond to blatant / lazy advertising attempts anymore. Instead conversation has to be engaging and it does not necessarily have everything to do with your product ALL the time.

In addition, engaging people through a greater marketing concept / campaign is essential. Social media can generate traffic and interest but it has to be used with tact and has to fit into a greater plan of action. It is not really possible to go into all the details here in a general section but a good online marketing campaign will make all the difference.

IN CONCLUSION

The social media rules are still being written. Where does social networking end and commercial networking begin? Is this the future of the Web, or just another evolutionary step? Will today’s social media leaders be around tomorrow, or will some other interupting technology crash the party?

The only thing that seems certain is that people are congregating at these social networking sites at an astounding rate. The landscape is changing, and these sites have become the backyard fences, the coffee shops, and the street corners of the 21st century.

Ignore them at your own risk.

Whether you are a small business, a large corporation, a performer, or an individual you need to have an identity. When it comes to design many people associate identity with logo design. This is not off the mark completely but there are other things that make up a visual identity that when produced effectively they will work in conjunction with each other to give a complete picture of your brand.

To breakdown what is involved in “identity” we need to take a look at three separate elements that all play a role in brand development.

BRAND: The perceived emotional corporate image as a whole. Everything a company does should reflect its values and aims of the business as a whole. Branding is not a bunch of colors, logos, slogans and designs it is a consistent message that shows people what the company stands for, what it believes in, and why it exists. The role of design in branding is huge because the designer forms the foundation for a brand.

IDENTITY: The visual aspects that form part of the overall brand.The identity is made up of many guidelines / standards and it involves all visual materials that can represent a business. A good example of identity can be seen in approved colors, fonts, graphics a company uses. The identity of a brand should be consistent, thought out and support the brand.

LOGO: Identifies a business in its simplest form via the use of a mark or icon. A logo is not the identity or the brand of a company. A good logo symbolizes a companies identity and supports the overall brand without relaying too much information. A logo can be compared to a persons first name. When meeting someone you want to be identified in a simple memorable way in order for others to remember you. It is important to note that only after a logo becomes familiar does it function the way it is intended to.

Web design is simpler than ever, and that’s a good thing. 2.0 design means focused, clean and simple. That doesn’t necessarily mean minimalist, as I’ll explain later.

I really believe in simplicity. That’s not to say that all web sites should be minimal, but that we should use as few features as are necessary to achieve what you need to achieve.

Why simplicity is good:

1. Web sites have goals and all web pages have purposes.
2. Users’ attention is a finite resource.
3. It’s the designer’s job to help users to find what they want (or to notice what the site wants them to notice)
4. Stuff on the screen attracts the eye. The more stuff there is, the more different things there are to notice, and the less likely a user is to notice the important stuff.
5. So we need to enable certain communication, and we also need to minimize noise. That means we need to find a solution that’s does its stuff with as little as possible. That’s economy, or simplicity.

Whenever you’re designing, take it as a discipline consciously to remove all unnecessary visual elements. Concentrate particularly on areas of the layout that are less relevant to the purpose of a page, because visual activity in these areas will distract attention from the key content and navigation.

“It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

Back in the late 90s having a website was considered a novelty. Everyone saw this as an opportunity to expand their business and there was a certain status associated with having a web site. At this time knowledge about what it takes to make a web site and what is involved was primitive. This lack of general understanding led to the DOT COM BOOM and a lot of people where making money off of other people’s ignorance. Eventually word spread because the information spread and the bubble burst on a lot of these “web” companies. Today we have the same things going on with the SEO and SEM industry.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be broken down into two main categories: on-page and off-page. In addition you have two different kinds of SEO organic and paid. Organic SEO can be the most cost effective way of optimizing your page but it takes patience to get results. Paid SEO involves using a google adwords account to manage a PPC (pay per click) campaign on google ( I will cover paid SEO in another post)

ON PAGE SEO: On page optimization is everything your webmaster can do in order to make your keywords stand out and be read by search engines. This is accomplished by having keywords repeat in the content of the site and be in line with your meta descriptions, and tags ( a few lines of code containing your keywords). To increase the relevancy make sure you include your keywords in your tags (alternate text for images) and use unique titles for every page on your website. Once you have these keywords set up all you have to do is to create new content for your site that also has these keywords ( ie. a blog or a newsfeed). Google likes pages that update frequently and if you post quality new information that has relevancy to your keywords you will be in good shape.

In order to increase readability of your site you should avoid building your site in FLASH or having large images load when the site is loading. This is part of the optimization process too because you want your site to load fast and be read by as many people and search engines as possible.

That is my very brief overview of on-page organic search engine optimization. I will be explaining Off Page SEO, Paid SEO and SEM in upcoming posts.