Small Business Design Resources

Free keyword research tool

Writing articles and having them search engine optimized just got easier with a new, free keyword software from Wordtracker called SEO Blogger. SEO Blogger is a Firefox plugin where you can search for the keywords and optimize your posts right as you’re writing them.

My most favorite and a really useful features of this keyword research tool is that it shows you how many times you’ve used one of your chosen keywords. This saves you a lot of time and lets you optimize your website for organic seo with ease.

Take a look at the overview of how this free seo tool works at SEO Blogger How to guide

Download the plugin at SEO Blogger

Free Alternatives to Photoshop

I use Photoshop on a daily basis, but not everyone is a designer nor can everyone afford it. Here’s a list of few free web based alternatives to Photoshop where you can either use them to create a new graphic from scratch or just do basic photo editing from your existing photos. I haven’t really used them to test all the features and tools, but I came up with the pros and cons based on my quick evaluation. First three are similar to Photoshop in a sense that you can create a graphic from scratch or open your own photo to work with. The last three are basically photo editing, meaning you will need to upload a photo to work with it.

http://www.pixlr.com/editor/ – The interface looks almost identical to Photoshop. Has all the features that you would need to do basic photo editing. Recently released, so it’s still in its growing phase. Pro: Loads really fast. Con: Doesn’t have rulers or guides.

http://www.splashup.com/ – Looks similar to Photoshop, but is a little tricky to use. There are no rulers here either. Pro: Interface similar to Photoshop. Con: A little tricky to use.

http://www.aviary.com (Phoenix Image Editor) – Was happy to see that this one has rulers and I can drag guides. Also has tutorials and explanations of the tools. Pro: Easy to use, has lots of tutorials. Con: Can’t think of any cons.

http://www.drpic.com/ – If you’re use to Photoshop, this one is a little hard to work with. Pro: Has a batch resize feature (in more tools section below all the main tools). Con: Takes a while to load, also has annoying ads.

http://fotoflexer.com/ – Another photo editor that doesn’t really look like Photoshop but is really easy to use. Has ads, but if you click on the Full Screen mode all you see is the editor and no ads or browser toolbar. Have easy-to-follow tutorials to help you along. Pro: Easy to use, great for scrapbookers. Con: Can’t think of any cons (but I haven’t tried everything).

http://www.picnik.com/app – Another one that’s great for scrapbookers. Of course anyone can use it that needs to edit their photos, lots of cool features and effects. Pro: Easy to use, looks like you can spend hours playing with all the features. Con: Not really a con, but you’ll need to upgrade to premium to use all the extra features.

There are a lot more, but these are the few that stood out. If you’ve used any of these and have your own pros and cons please leave a comment to share those with everyone.

Images on the web vs. Images printed explained

There’s a huge difference when preparing images for web use and preparing images for printing purposes. The major difference is in color type and resolution.

How is CMYK different from RGB
Images online use color combination known as RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and images that are printed use color combination know as CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). What this basically means is that the colors of an image/graphic that you see on your screen will NOT be exactly the same as when you print that image/graphic. Images on the monitor will appear lighter then the once that are printed. This is due to the monitor being lit from the back to light up your screen. The colors that are seen on screen will vary from one monitor to the other because each individual sets their monitor to their liking.

Image resolution, 72dpi vs. 300dpi
Resolution for images online is recommended to be no more than 72dpi (dots per inch) vs. resolution for images that are printed is recommended to be at least 300dpi. As you can see there’s a big difference between 72 and 300. Basically, the dpi will determine how clear the image will look and this is most concerned for printed images. Web images need to be on the low scale because the resolution affects the loading time. Online users don’t have patience for an image to load. The smaller the image, the faster the website/blog/email will load.

Preparing your images for online use
Best practice is to prepare the image the size that you need it to be before you upload it online. Uploading a huge image to your website and then scaling it, will NOT make the physical image smaller, it will only appear smaller, thus still slow down the loading time. Take look at this short video on how to make your image smaller using FotoFlexer.com

Once you’ve made your images physically smaller, you can go ahead and use them online.

Preparing your images for printing
It’s best to have a professional prepare your images for printing. There are a lot of things to consider when getting your images ready for print.

How To Determine Your Target Market

Figuring out how to market your small business website effectively is critical to the success of your business, especially if you are investing time and money in advertising. For example, you don’t want to target high-end luxury goods to low income people or low-end goods to people looking to buy the very best.

Understanding how your customers’ think and what their spending habits are, is one of the keys of successful marketing. This is true whether your business is a mom and pop store on the corner of town or a small business website with great potential for global appeal.

There are some basic questions you can ask yourself when directing a marketing campaign – or even when choosing what products to emphasize on your website. Who needs the product? Is it a niche product or one with global appeal? Are you trying to reach a specific age group, if so consider who else you might need to market to. For example, if you are marketing video games to children under the age of 18, your advertising needs to appeal to youth but also to parents. If you are marketing luxury goods to men who are likely to be married, you might also need to target their wives and so on.

Once you have identified your target audience you need to think how you are going to reach your audience from your small business website. What blogs might your audience be reading? What sites might they be going to where it is worth your while to spend money on advertising? If you are not sure, go to some sites and look for ads for similar products to yours. If you notice that several other websites with similar products are favoring particular methods of advertising – perhaps they’re on to something.

Don’t be afraid of exploring new technology. Viral videos are all the rage, mostly because they work. Explore places like YouTube, and Twitter, and look into using Yahoo and Google ads to see how you can improve traffic to your website. Don’t just create your own log-ins to these sites, but leave messages on other people’s sites – preferably sites that might be attracting the same kind of traffic as would like to see coming to your site – and don’t forget to leave your calling card – a link back to your website.

Because owners of small business websites are usually on a tight budget, don’t overextend the finances to invest in heavy advertising until you know it’s working. Once you know you are reaching the right audience, you will know when it’s time for a more committed investment. Remember to monitor your advertising sites and when you get traffic to your site, make yourself aware of where it’s coming from. There are many tools on the market that will help you analyze traffic and many of them come free. Ultimately who is coming to your site will drive your ongoing marketing strategy. You want to know who is buying and what they are buying. Statistics are vital for increasing performance. You need to know what is going on in order to leverage it or improve it.

And don’t give up, remember that with persistence comes learning and the more you learn the easier it becomes. If you are a new small business website owner, expect a learning curve and exercise patience until you start to see traffic, and do good research to find out what’s going on with your website.

Keys to Search Engine Optimization:

You have built your website and published it to the web; you sit back and wait patiently but your site doesn’t show up in any major search engine. You might start to wonder; why won’t my website show up in a Google search? If you just sit and wait for your website to show up in a search engine such as Google, you might be waiting for weeks. If this is happening to you it’s time to review your search engine optimization strategy. Here are a few key pointers to ensure you are doing all the right things.

Getting your site to the top of the search engines is both an art and a science. Websites use crawlers and “bots” (short for robot) to crawl all the sites on the web. Using a complicated series of proprietary algorithms they assign rankings to web sites based on your site’s keywords. The phrase Search Engine Optimization refers to the art of building a site that ranks high in the search engines. To check your google ranking you can go to http://www.prchecker.info. Your site must be published before it will be ranked and it may take a few weeks after you publish the site before you have a ranking. That’s because it takes some time fort the search engines to find you. There are millions of websites on the internet.

The rank is based on a keyword or key phrase and how relevant that key word or phrase is to your site. So you may rank high in one key word and low in every other. The more narrowly you focus on a single key word or phrase throughout your site, the more likely you are to improve your ranking for that key word or phrase. The objective is to have your entry show up on the first results page for your chosen keyword or key phrase. You don’t need to understand exactly how search engine optimization works in order to get your site to the top, but you do need a few insights. Here are some tips that will help you improve your ranking:

1. Know what key phrases are being searched on
There is no point in building keyword density on words that no-one is searching for. Even if you get to the top of the rankings on that keyword, if no-one is typing it in, they won’t ever find you! A reverse search engine tool will help you optimize on what people enter in the search engines to look for your product. For example, “women’s clothing” is a popular search phrase, whereas very few people search for “blouse with white polka dots” even though it is a valid piece of women’s clothing. So you must find out what people are searching for.

Here are a few Google tools to help you out:
Search-based keyword tool
Google Insights for Search

2. Be relevant
This is perhaps one of the most important concepts to search engine optimization. Your keywords must be relevant to your website. And you must use them throughout your site, including in your web page titles, in your meta-tags, in your article titles and even, if you can, in your domain name itself. If your website sells pet products, and your keyword is “pet” you will be relevant, but if your website sells women’s clothing, and your key word is “polka dots” that won’t be so relevant because it is very narrow, so choice of keywords is very important. Now, if your website only sold items of clothing with polka dots, then polka dots becomes a very significant keyword. Again, you would want to make sure that there is a market for polka dots, by examining the reverse search engine results.

3. Use linking
When the search engines do their crawling, one way they “discover” sites is by following links from other sites. When you first publish your site, even if you have done a good job with search engine optimization, it can take several weeks for your site to show up in the search engines – sometimes three weeks or more. You can reduce this time by using a good linking strategy. Let’s say a web site with a high rank links to your site, then your site will be discovered more quickly than if there are no links pointing to it. It is important to link and be linked by sites that are relevant to your keywords. Linking to lower ranked sites that are relevant to your own is okay too, even though it may not help you as fast, but linking to sites that are not relevant to yours can impact your ranking.

So that’s the science of Search Engine Optimization, now the art comes with practice. There are many tools on the market that allow you to analyze the traffic to your website, analyze keyword density and even analyze the keyword density on your competitor’s site. One of my favorite tools is http://www.websitegrader.com website. So if your website doesn’t show up on the first page of Google at your first attempt, don’t give up.