Every business owner wants his or her company to stand out in the vast sea of online retailers. Branding is a crucial part of gaining new customers and seeing high profits month after month. Branding is not simply creating a theme for your company, but creating an overall image. Branding is an encompassing term that relates to five specific topics - your logo, your slogan, your web design, your marketing theme, and you overall company attitude. For a business owner, especially a small business owner, branding can seem like an extremely daunting task. However, branding is really no more difficult than any other aspect of running a business. Like anything else, branding is a skill that just takes a little time and a lot of practice to master. Here are some branding tips to get you started.

Logo - A killer logo is the first step in successfully branding your business. Companies like Coca-Cola and Apple Computers know this, and that is why more than half of the world’s population can recognize their logos immediately. Never simply go with clip art or your company name in a bold font. Work with a professional designer and really brainstorm an image that will stick in the heads of potential customers.

Slogan - After the logo, your business’ slogan is the second most important part of branding your company. If I say the words “just do it”, you immediately think of Nike, right? That slogan doesn’t only improve sales for Nike, it aids in it’s overall branding. As in, Nike doesn’t just become a retailer where people buy shoes, it becomes a strong background of athletic culture. You don’t just associate this company with footwear, you associate it with the overall athletic experience. That is a good example of successful branding. Your slogan shouldn’t just relate to your product, it should relate to the overall experience that customers can look forward to when using your product.

Web Design - A great web site is an important part of branding. Everyone in the Western world is familiar with Apple Computer’s simplistic and user friendly web site. In today’s digital age, more and more people are choosing to obtain most of their products and entertainment via the internet, which is why a strong web design is crucial to the branding of your business.

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SEO, or search engine optimization, serves a purpose by not only boosting web traffic to your website, but also as a service that most companies need. Without the use of professional studies, but by day-to-day research of your own, most people find a website for the first time by searching through a search engine. For the company or individual who created the website, developing a search engine friendly website is a necessity, rather than an option. A website is not effective if no one can locate it. A low ranking website equals low visitation and zero revenue. As more people have learned about this topic, the need for SEO Services has increased. SEO services and SEO web design work hand-in-hand in designing powerful, visible websites.

It’s likely that every major U.S. city has a SEO services company not far from them. Not every SEO Services company is alike though. So for those working in web design or web development, it is important to perform research to find out the range of SEO web design services offered at a particular SEO services company.

What to Look For When Selecting SEO Services

SEO web design is currently a hot selling draw for businesses and individuals. SEO services should include a team of search engine optimization experts who have a proven track record of success. As a webmaster or individual who seeks to employ an SEO services company for SEO web design, it’s important to consult with the company to strategize a plan of action. You should already have an idea of what you would like your website to illustrate. At your first consultation discuss budget, ways to improve your ranking and have the SEO services company design a personalized analysis and package of their marketing services. Some services do not require a long contract or upfront setup fees (you pay after seeing results). Inquire about the need for paid advertising services like pay-per-click and work together to establish realistic goals for improving rank.

A great SEO services company will house a team of SEO web design experts who provide the latest technology to boost traffic, while reducing some Internet marketing costs.  SEO services companies should also offer an excellent account management staff, client testimonials with high success rates and proven SEO web design methods that are not currently banned on any search engines.

Basic Web Design vs. SEO Web Design

Internet marketing is an area of web development that should be heavily catered to and comprehensive. Services such as web statistics, search engine optimization and branding help to intensify visibility, revenue and placement of websites.

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The Internet has transformed customer buying behavior as never before. Branding your new on-line business involves much more than simply choosing a brand name and asking customers to choose your brand over your competitor’s.

Companies participating in e-commerce compete for customers in an ever expanding marketplace. Understanding how on-line consumers develop familiarity with a brand, and ultimately loyalty to that brand, is crucial to any new e-brand’s success.

These image branding tips will provide ideas to help you choose a name for your new e-brand and ways to distinguish your brand from other similar brands on the internet.

Image Branding Tip #1-Understanding SEO: The 1st key to branding success

Appearing among the top-ranking search engine results is the single most important factor affecting new e-brand recognition. Real world brick and mortar businesses used to rely heavily on branding strategies like advertising on radio and television, or in printed newspaper and magazine ads.

These older branding strategies are relative ineffective for marketing new e-brands. Successful on-line e-branding may lead to real world brand recognition, but rarely visa-versa. One of the most rewarding things any new e-business owner can do is to learn everything they can about search engine optimization and how to optimize their website.

Image Branding Tip #2-Provide quality site content.

The quality of site content is the primary thing that draws on-line visitors to your website. Never forget that a competitor’s site is just a mouse click away. Visitors are looking for information. Provide them with what they want and they will return for more.

There are thousands, if not millions of websites offering the same or similar products and services. These websites often have very little to distinguish one from another. Unless you convincingly show site visitors your e-brand is somehow superior to the competition, your new brand and on-line business will not withstand the competition.

Image Branding Tip #3-Know what your customer wants

Don’t just produce a product and then try to brand and market it on-line. First, find out what your targeted audience wants or really needs. Then, try to meet that need with either a new product or service, or a better version of an older one. What can you provide that your competitors aren’t offering? What can you do better?

It is much easier to convince visitors to your website that you have the solution to their problems than to try and convince them to buy something they don’t really need or want.

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Search engines have tremendous power over the success or failure of any on-line business.  Webmasters can use these SEO strategies to their advantage and optimize any websites for increased SEO resulting in greater brand recognition.

SEO Strategy #1-Optimize the website’s linking structure

The web pages’ linking text structure is one of the most important aspects of SEO, Visitors to your website depend on being able to navigate freely.  If a website is confusing or difficult to navigate, it will lose site visitors.

Search engines put a lot of importance to a site’s anchor linking structure. Good anchor text makes linking easier and allows search engine “spiders” to navigate freely throughout the site without getting stuck. This will help prevent engine spiders from stopping in the middle of indexing your website.

Here are some SEO linking tip examples:

A static text link looks like this. <A href=”myPage.html”>My Link Text</A>

Add your keyword phrase inside this anchor text linking it to a relevant web page like this: <A href=”/seo/seo-articles.html”>browse through our large selection of free seo articles</A> In this example notice the link text as well as the directory (named articles), and the page name it is linking to, all have the same keyword phrase. This will significantly increase SEO.

Google highlights the key search terms present in a website’s “URL.”  Google also takes key terms from a URL’s body text content whenever there are no key search terms present in the site’s URL.

This is why naming your own links with key words/terms on each individual web page is so important.  Adding your keyword/phrase 3-5 times into the link text and having 15-25 inbound links present increase SEO.

SEO increases whenever the text link has been embedded inside a readable paragraph.  Please note that this does not take the place of other key terms in the paragraph text.  There still has to be a menu for navigation that will contain some of the same links.

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In the first article in this series, we reviewed the psychological power of color and how colors are subconsciously associated with symbolic meanings.

Colors have the power to affect our emotions, perceptions, and interactions. I failed to mention the color symbolism in the first article, Web Design Tips: Power of Color Part I was based on a purely Western perspective.

Other cultures may view colors from a totally different psychological point of view than Westerners. For instance, Westerners commonly view the color red symbolically with love and passion.  But, it represents good luck to the Chinese, and purity to those from India. Red is the color worn by brides in the East and mourners from South Africa.  It represents Communism to Russians and a color of Christmas and Valentine’s Day to most Americans.

Find out what a particular color may symbolize before targeting unfamiliar cultures.  This will help you to avoid any unintentional offense. Otherwise, web designers trying to maximize the psychological power of color may have their attempts severely backfire.

That being said, this second article will focus more on the effective use of color combinations and how color can be used to bind a design together for optimum appeal. Here are some web design tips to help in choosing colors in your next web design.

Web Design Tip #1) Don’t use more than two or three colors on a single page. Too many colors become too busy and distracting.

Web Design Tip #2) Use the same background color on each page of the web site. Maintaining color consistency throughout the web design is very important to overall site continuity and avoiding appearing disjointed.  Think of uniform background color of all site pages as the glue holding the site together.  Take away your glue and the site starts falling apart.

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What do Nike, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola all have in common? If you said that they were well-known corporations that would be half true. All three of these corporations utilize corporate branding and have a recognizable image that the public knows without having to reveal the name of the company. Their corporate branding and image have been built with such strength that everyone knows what they sell. In business, this term is called corporate branding. In cyberspace it can spell dollars. It’s the consistent message that you market to the public and the emotional response or perception that people have when they think of your business. Successful corporate branding and image branding translates to customer loyalty, increased revenue and image marketing. Corporate branding and image branding should be consistently maintained and should stick in the consumers’ minds.  Often, consumers will remember the colors or the logo of a company - the image of the company. Corporate branding is the public relations of the business world. And there’s no better place for PR than the company’s website.

Building a Corporate Brand

Corporate branding and image branding are all around us. It’s in printing, logos and on the Internet. We cannot use a mouse pad or come across a refrigerator magnet without seeing a company’s image branded on the product. The purpose of image branding and corporate branding is to repetitively market your product or idea to the customer so that they recognize it instantly. More importantly, companies want that brand recognition to build revenue. Webmasters who own or run a website should approach image branding as a marketing tool and if an e-commerce website, a revenue generator. Deciding how strong an image brand for your site should be depends upon your objective for the website. If your website was designed to build and attract consumers, than image branding is a needed tool. On the other hand, if your website plans to draw visitors as an intermediary to a bigger website, than there’s no need to heavily invest in image branding. It’s easier to keep existing visitors than to attract new ones.

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Alexa is a web-ranking service that measures the traffic a website generates by looking at both the number of times a website is viewed per day, as well as the overall “reach.” Alexa rating is important because many advertisers and webmasters look at it as a way to determine the value of a link on the website.  As a result, managing your Alexa rank is important if you are looking to use link advertisements as a way to generate money.  With this in mind, the following are a few strategies for increasing a website’s Alexa rank.

Increase the Proportion of Your Visitors that Use Alexa

Alexa determines its rankings based on the number of users and site views from those who transmit data via the Alexa toolbar, also known as Sparky. The Alexa toolbar is commonly installed on a browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.  As a result, visitors only count towards your Alexa ranking if they have the toolbar downloaded and installed.  Increasing your appeal to these users will rapidly result in your website moving up the rankings.

One group that often uses the Alexa toolbar is webmasters and other people interested in web design.  Developing content of interest to webmasters and encouraging webmaster visits will greatly aid in increasing a site’s Alexa ranking.  Another group that appears to have a great number of Alexa users is users in East Asia, based on the presence of several Asian websites in the Alexa top 500.  Advertising on Asian social networking sites may help increase the number of visitors with the Alexa toolbar enabled.

Increase traffic

The best way to increase traffic, long-term, is to develop quality content that leads to a strong base of users who visit frequently.  Aside from this, a few inexpensive Payperclick advertisements, such as those offered by Google, Yahoo or Exactseek, will increase traffic, and thus, your Alexa ranking. You may target keywords to audiences who may have a higher likelihood of possessing the Alexa toolbar, such as webmasters and other Alexa-heavy groups.  An alternative suggestion to this is buying banners or links from webmaster forums and websites.

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When developing a personal or small business website, it is important to make sure that the user feels interested in each page and that they are motivated to fully explore the website.  There are many strategies to accomplish this and we will explore several such ideas below.

Tip 1:  Make each page count

If a user is going to click on a link, they want it to be informative, interesting, and worth viewing in its entirety.  One way to ensure this is to craft each page to be either new information or content that is useful to the reader.  Each new page on your website should answer the questions “Why is this page important for the reader?  And why should they click the next link?”  If the page includes advertisements, the ratio (and placement) should reflect this goal.  At the very least, each page should contain a 3:1 information to advertisement ratio.  The ads should also be broken up within each page to ensure that the page is fully viewed; nothing dissuades a customer like a long block of ads with no original content.

Tip 2: Avoid clutter

Nothing undermines the professionalism of your website like distractions.  Do not rely on animation and sounds; they can be distracting.  A visitor’s eye is best trained on the text of each page and the links you provide.  Unnecessary flair detracts from this purpose.  It is like trying to read on a crowded bus while being constantly jostled.

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If you are starting a website, coming up at the top of a search engine results is a must, and doing so in a cost effective, organic method is most ideal. To this end, you may be considering SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  But did you know that getting hits on Google requires more than just optimizing your site for the right keywords?  There are a lot of ways to ensure that you are found with ease and relevance when someone is searching the web for products or services similar to your own.  Let us take a closer look at some of the key methods of achieving higher rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

1. Raise your profile

The easy way to do this is to launch a blog.  Launching a blog not only allows you to plug in keyword, helping you get hits, but it gives you a chance to cross-promote and generate authority on the web.  Not only will this help raise traffic on the web, but periodic articles will enhance your SEO and raise the chances that when someone is scanning the web, they will come up with you as a result.

In addition to, or instead of, starting a blog, you can try to cross-promote. A great way to do this is to profile prominent figures and bloggers in your field.  Not only will including other notable people and companies increase your SEO, it offers many opportunities to increase your hits via tapping into the audience that supports the figure with whom you are profiling.

In addition, including information on other significant companies, websites, and bloggers, will not only increase your SEO, but will encourage them to provide links and profiles of your website, giving you additional back links and traffic.  No one can resist free exposure, especially if it is high level, and it serves two purposes, not only will it increase your SEO and hits, but it gives the blogger a reason to mention you, which will only add to your hits per month.

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The importance of branding should hardly come as any surprise.  Brands and logos are some of the most resonant images in the minds of consumers today. This is splendid if you, like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, already have well established brands that practically serve as their own advertising.  But how does a startup company establish and create its own brand?  Here are a few important strategies for developing your brand.

Establish your brand’s dominance in your niche

Initially you must determine what your niche is.  This is extremely important; you don’t want to be one of the many businesses in your niche, you want to be the only (or best) one.  So look for areas where there is a relative vacuum, and launch your startup’s brand there.  In some cases, it may be best to define your brand geographically.  If you can target your startup to a particular region or community, not only can it help define your niche but it can also help establish the dominance of your brand in the minds of your target audience.

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