I have successfully been on the first page in Google for freelance graphic designer for a few months now and I’m quite pleased with this.
Marketing yourself is one of the most important things any professional or company will do. For this reason I’m going to write a number of articles about self-marketing, what I mean by it and how I do it.
I’m not going to go on about crafting a mission statement, identifying expertise and clients and creating a robust consistent identity. I’m sure everyone spends a lot of time on that and it’s specific to each organisation. What I wish to tell you about the details of how I think you can run a successful website and company in these challenging times.
Search Engine Optimisation
The first thing to remember with SEO is that you can’t cheat the system. What I mean is that there is no easy course of action that will make your website first on Google after having entered certain keywords.
However, if you have content specific to those keywords and it is proven to be, so other websites link to you in a certain way, then quality targetted traffic will come your way from the search engines.
A WordPress blog is well designed and structured already for search engine optimisation and this is my preferred method of creating and updating content for visitors, clients and search engines alike.
But SEO doesn’t start and finish with a blog. There are many things you can do before, during and after creating your blog that will mean success or failure with the search engines.
General Marketing
Once that is all explained I will go on to other things you can do to promote yourself and your organisation. By general marketing I mean promotion. I’ll leave the price, place, product, process and physical evidence to you!
I will explain how to design and produce HTML emails, flyers, business stationery, etc.
How do I get on the first page of Google’s search results?
I’d guess that there’s probably a million pages on the internet dedicated to answering this question. Come to think of it, there’s probably more than a million people in the world working in this area (SEO). I’m prepared to admit I’m prone to exaggeration but if someone would like to put me right on this then I’ll stand corrected!
It’s the 64 million dollar question but it has a simple answer although it’s a solution that involves hard work and eats up time.
Here is my answer: create a website with lots of constantly updated, quality, relevant content with lots of inbound links from other quality, relevant websites.
Now, this needs further explanation (for example, you my well ask: how many is “lots”?) and people may disagree with the “constantly updated” bit, but that is essentially it – as far as I’m concerned.
What now?
So, I will try to post the next installment in this series of How to market yourself soon where I will explain what to do in order to set up your website or WordPress blog.