Papertree Design » SEO

Design Notebook 11/23/2008

Jeremy — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:46:41 +0000

I managed to skip last weeks design notebook entry due to the need for sleep and the pressing issue of finding a new home for Papertreedesign.com. (I ended up going with Media Temple if anyone is interested. Anyhow the list of links was beginging to pile up in my handy little text file so I need to catch up and get a few of these out there. Consider this weeks design notebook a conglomeration of interesting things I have had the pleasure of reading over the past two weeks. Enjoy and try to find something useful!

Design and Marketing Inspiration

42 Information Packed Twitter Backgrounds – Iammikesmith.com
37 More Information Packed Twitter Backgrounds – Iammikesmith.com

The Result

Loving This One

As you can see from the shot above I have yet to put it to good use but…
How To Make Exciting Screenshots In Photoshop or Gimp – ProBlogDesign.com

On Blogging

Awesome article:
7 Secrets You Must Know to Give Your Blog the Edge – JustCreativeDesign.com

Really Diggin this Blog

WpEngineer.com

SEO

Some pretty obvious and some pretty interesting:
10 Ways to Piss of SEO – AlhanKeser.com

On the Must Read List

A Follow Up to “Experimenting With SEO Technique”

Jeremy — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:24:33 +0000

About a month ago I wrote an article on Waukesha Web Designer, regarding some experimentation I had been doing with SEO and I felt that it was time to do a brief follow up to that. Part of my experiment was to gain a better understanding of how important it is to focus and target your keywords when developing an SEO strategy. To my delight I have managed to make quite a bit of headway in the search engines for the particular keywords I had been targeting. If you would like to get a better understanding of what I set out to do and how I planned to do it I suggest reading the original article “Experimenting With SEO Technique“.

When I set out to create this campaign I was very focused on one particular area or target market. Now of course I would have no issue with offering my service to businesses and individuals outside of my immediate market area, but I felt that it made sense to start close and build a foundation I could expand upon in the future. As stated in the article, part of my technique was to create articles and static pages that had a well designed structure to them a sort of trickle down effect. I started with a good focused title and worked my way down, being sure to reiterate my purpose within the first few sentences of text. For some this is very obvious, but how many of us actually pay attention to why this is important? I then continued with each article and page, remaining focused on it’s original intention, paying close attention to a small number of keywords and never straying to far off course. (A unfortunate problem of mine and one that shows in my past writing.) Once I had some decent content generated I started to focus on how my site might get found outside of normal search because I new that this was important to climbing in the ranks. Now without getting to much into linking strategy I will say that I continue to “market” myself and my services through interaction with the community both online and off. I point out here that the key to this is interaction. People are constantly bombarded with marketing pitches and catchy one liners so go beyond that and make yourself, your services and your knowledge valuable. The more valuable the information or service you provide, the more likely someone is to pass it on to others, whether it be through the form of a direct link or a complimentary nod in your direction.

I plan to continue my experimentation, slowly expanding my focus little by little to reach a broader market and in doing so I will always reveal my discovery but in the mean time I suggest reading through that article and start to think about your own strategy. I am no expert but so far I have seen very promising results.

Introducing Waukesha Web Designer

Jeremy — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:02:14 +0000

Waukesha Web Designer, it has a nice ring to it don’t you think? I have been hard at work over the last few days trying to put together something nice for my latest creation and I finally feel like it is in good enough shape to share with the rest of you. So without further ado I introduce to you www.waukeshawebdesigner.com. The site is done entirely in WordPress and I consider it a work in progress. There is a lot more I would like to do as far as usability and design. I need to point out here that it wasn’t until later this evening that I realized how similar the design is to the actual WP admin area. Perhaps this is a warning to myself that I need to take a few days rest?

My goals for creating this site are many. First and foremost I see it as a way to help educate local business owners on the advantages of creating a strong web presence and how they might go about doing so. I also see it as a place were I can share some of my experiences relating to a whole range of topics including design, SEO, web 2.0 strategy, usability, social networking and even some coding. And last but not least I plan on sharing some of my other less than web related work such as logo and brand design. And besides lets be honest with each other here, being that I am from the Waukesha area and design websites, I would have been plain stupid to pass this one up.

I encourage you, especially those of you living in and around the Waukesha area to join me and see where this thing can take us!