Freelance graphic designer and SEO
December 30, 2007 – 1:36 pm
The primary objective of this website is to attract clients to my design business. The two ways I try to achieve this are:
- Get other good websites to link to me with my desired keywords as the anchor text. For example, freelance graphic designer, designer in London, UK design services, are good phrases to explain what I do and I try to get these words a published as a hyperlink to my site on as many sites as possible.
- Write regularly updated content with my keywords scattered around the site, particularly within title tags and headline tags. So I try to write an article a week about artworking, designing, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, logos, packaging, marketing, advertising … the list goes on and on!
This strategy has reaped rewards as I have been employed by some great clients this year (Accenture and MasterCard, for example) who have asked me to help them on a variety of interesting projects. All because they found me on Google, or some similar search engine.
However there have been interesting reductions in traffic from search engines recently. At the beginning of October and again at the beginning of November there have been slight but noticeable decreases in visitors from all the major search engines.
The other lessening of visitors was much more abrupt. On December 7th traffic from image searches dropped by about 50% and has never returned!
Such is the unpredictable nature of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). It’s not an exact science as it takes a bit of luck to second guess Google’s secret algorithm – the mathematical equation that uses certain information from a website in order to define its rankings – and get on the first page of search results.
I’ll give it a try now.
4 Responses to “Freelance graphic designer and SEO”
Hi Rob,
This post relates to me as I put a lot of time and effort into getting my site to the top of Google for my chosen keywords, and today that is how I get 90% of my new clients for one of my sites. I just launched my new website for my company, and I am currently working hard to get it highly ranked. I agree with you that performing well on searches is golden, and the ticket to success for services like ours.
By Brian on Feb 10, 2008
I quite agree, Brian. I can’t stress enough the importance of regularly updated quality content with a sprinkling of your keywords throughout to keep the search engines interested! It isn’t as simple as that, of course. I’d be interested to hear other people’s tip and tricks on this subject. At least I’m scoring quite high for “freelance designer london” at the moment. A little bit of effort can reap great rewards!
By Rob Cubbon on Feb 13, 2008
Its true a few weeks of getting a few links into your site helps as well. Quality content is a big part of if, create a site with plenty of content, and on different pages. The bigger the site, i guess one would assume without going through the site that it is more important. I personally like the idea of plenty of good content.
By New Zealand Web design on May 8, 2008
I agree, New Zealand Web design, I like quality content. It’s what the search engines want at the end of the day – to direct their users to sites that they’ll enjoy or feel benefit from going to.
By Rob Cubbon on May 8, 2008