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L

Locals Find!

New Member
Would just like to say that wordpress is for designing blogs not websites. Search Engines do not classify blogs as website and they are very difficult to get up in rankings.

At the minimum purchase some form of SEO service no matter what route you for your site. Without SEO A website is as good as a sign in a closet.
 
Jim Doggett

Jim Doggett

New Member
L

Locals Find!

New Member
Search Engine Optimization

Its a must to get your website to show up in search engines. Most reputable companies will charge $1000 + a year. Some less reputable companies have been advertising monthly fees and guaranteed rankings, which is all a lot of smoke and mirrors.

I have someone that I use for clients if you need a referral.
 
L

Locals Find!

New Member
Jim Doggett said:
Sweet. The geeks are saying that HTML is dead / dying and won't be Google, etc. crawled. But I think that's bunk.

But just in case, maybe add some social network stuff (add this button, minimum)

Also every signshop should be on Google Map (Google local). If you are not, do it before taking your next breath. It's that good -- and free.

https://www.google.com/accounts/Ser...om/local/add/businessCenter?hl=en&gl=us&hl=en
Click to expand...

Agree, and don't Forget Merchant Circle. Has both free and paid. Paid gives you a few more features but even the free is pretty powerful in helping your rankings.
 
Jim Doggett

Jim Doggett

New Member
SEO is "Search Engine Optimization." But these days, SEO/Social Networking is the new buzz phrase.

That can start replacing sleep :^) So the easy thing is to get Tweetdeck (free) and automatically put your Twitter tweets on Facebook. (half the work)

Thentweet something, daily. Take a pic with your smartphone and tweet it or put it on facebook or whatever. Just be sure to hashmark (#jimdoggettissupercool, for example) keywords that matter to your business.

There's a better car than you drive. Always will be. There's also better SEO. So don't kill yourself. Do simple and effective stuff, and then go back to running your business, IMHO :^)

Jim
 
L

Locals Find!

New Member
Jim Doggett said:
SEO is "Search Engine Optimization." But these days, SEO/Social Networking is the new buzz phrase.

That can get replace sleep :^)

So the easy thing is to get Tweetdeck (free) and automatically put your Twitter tweets on Facebook. (half the work)

The tweet something, daily. Take a pic with your smartphone and tweet it or put it on facebook or whatever. Just be sure to hashmark (#jimdoggettissupercool, for example) keywords that matter to your business.

There's a better car than you drive. Always will be. There's also better SEO. So don't kill yourself. Do simple and effective stuff, and then go back to running your business, IMHO :^)

Jim
Click to expand...

Jim has some good points here, but like anything else in Business investing in Good SEO along with what Jim suggests will only help your business. Never hurts to come up higher on Google no matter what your business model.
 
p3

p3

New Member
I agree with Dan. Working at an online retailer and seeing how they go about driving traffic to their site is actually quite the process. And we hire other companies to help us too. A novice building a site is cool if you want to show your friends but as far as getting people that don't know about you just searching "banners" or something and for you to come up takes a lot of SEO strategy and building your site around your SEO ideas. Also you can better it with using CSS and replacing text with images, but when viewing the page without style it displays with plain text. So that information gets crawled by google... So you don't lose info like your company name that a lot of people have just as images in the headers. If you aren't good at SEO or even know what it is, just creating a site in wordpress helps a ton. Thats what I did and I haven't messed with my site in a long time and it doesn't even really have any info on it but if you search "screenprinting oakley ca" or "vehicle wraps oakley ca" its one of the first sites that pop up along with replacing the city with nearby areas. Creating a website and creating a website that gets traffic and has conversion rates are two completely different things. But it seems to me, you are building a website to show your portfolio, so why not show it to people searching for your services. It may come up with cheaper sites around it, but if you can show your work and people can see the difference in quality and actually use you then it pays off having a professional create one for you. Plus, then getting into making sure it works on multiple browsers correctly along with different screen resolutions.

my website is www.p3promotion.com though. Working on re-doing it and hopefully launch it here soon.

My $0.02
 
Dan Antonelli

Dan Antonelli

New Member
FrankenSigns.biz said:
One vote for WordPress.

Dan, not smart a thing to say. Not at all.

We may not be as talented as you but you are not giving us "average" guys enough credit. People can learn ya know...
Click to expand...

People can learn, but at what cost? Is it the best use of the time? Will they produce a professional site that represents the type of work they want to do and the professionalism they hope to portray? Will it be optimized properly to generate work? Will have the marketing and thought process behind it to elevate their brand, and attract the right clientele?

The smartest business owners I know surround themselves with people who are better at any given task so that they can focus on doing what they do best. Many others let their ego get in the way of such tasks, and are actually responsible for holding their business back rather than helping it prosper.

That goes not just for sign people, but any business owner.

So only you can decide if the investment in a professional warrants the ROI one would provide your business, or if its a better allocation of your time to try and learn on your everything you might need to know to do it properly.
 
inthesignbiz

inthesignbiz

New Member
Adtechia LLC said:
Search Engine Optimization

Its a must to get your website to show up in search engines. Most reputable companies will charge $1000 + a year. Some less reputable companies have been advertising monthly fees and guaranteed rankings, which is all a lot of smoke and mirrors.

I have someone that I use for clients if you need a referral.
Click to expand...

SEO?
Are freakin serious? $1000 a month.
My brother-in-law fell for that after I built his site.
All he got was $12,000 in the crapper after a year.

If you go to Google or Yahoo and type in signs san angelo (my home town) we come up first - ALWAYS.

First and forth on Google.
The forth is a listing for signsmiths.us
They went upside down and let thier registration lapse.
I bought it and now it's redirected to our site.

Just takes a little time and research.
 
L

Locals Find!

New Member
inthesignbiz said:
SEO?
Are freakin serious? $1000 a month.
My brother-in-law fell for that after I built his site.
All he got was $12,000 in the crapper after a year.

If you go to Google or Yahoo and type in signs san angelo (my home town) we come up first - ALWAYS.

First and forth on Google.
The forth is a listing for signsmiths.us
They went upside down and let thier registration lapse.
I bought it and now it's redirected to our site.

Just takes a little time and research.
Click to expand...

Not $1000 a month. $1000 a YEAR.
 
Jim Doggett

Jim Doggett

New Member
+1 on what Dan's saying, too. I'd add that Website making can have a fun factor, and really take you away from running your company, if you're not careful.

And like everything, you'll overdo it. It can be very much like your first wordprocessing program (with 20 fonts!!) or the first time you discover Photoshop layer effects (and use all of them!)

If you can afford a guy like Dan, it will pay, many times over, I believe.
 
inthesignbiz

inthesignbiz

New Member
I called my brother-in-law to see what it was he did.
He paid $1500 down and $750 a month for the SEO thing.
He said best he did was 10th in his category.
Not 12 grand - close to 10.

Nevertheless, if you're going to do such a thing, find a good one.

There are scammers everywhere - even if they appear reputable.

As for me, $1000 a year buys a lot of beer and pretzels.
 
Jim Doggett

Jim Doggett

New Member
luggnut said:
one i'm still in progress on.....here
Click to expand...

Nice. But you might want to have a color for link text. Link and body text looks identical until you mouseover and it's underlined. In the biz we call it Mysterymeat Navigation. (major no-no; people won't click hidden links)
 
S

speedmedia

New Member
FrankenSigns.biz said:
One vote for WordPress.

Dan, not smart a thing to say. Not at all.

We may not be as talented as you but you are not giving us "average" guys enough credit. People can learn ya know...
Click to expand...

I could learn to build a house but you can sure as hell bet I am going to hire someone who is qualified to do it.

Dan isn't discounting your work or the work of an "average" guy. He is making a great point, yes and no. If you hodgepodge a website together it isn't going to do anything but make you look bad, remember it is the face of your business.

Thanks,
Kurt
 
FrankenSigns.biz

FrankenSigns.biz

New Member
Building a website is nothing like building a house, so bad analogy. Building a website is well up the alley of a graphic designer like many of us here. Bearing in mind, of course, what this entire thread pertains to, I think it was a bit of an inappropriate thing to say, IMHO.
 
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