Small Business Design Resources

Free Christmas Graphics Giveaway – Day 3

These are free for you to use for personal and business use, except for resale. Make sure to come back everyday for new graphics to download.

Quick Tip:

Use a decorative font to write a title on the banner and place it on your blog. Or you can incorporate this banner in a greeting card design.

Free Christmas Graphics Giveaway – Day 2

These are free for you to use for personal and business use, except for resale. Make sure to come back everyday for new graphics to download.

Quick Tip:

Print these Christmas tags out, cut them out and use them on gifts to add that personal touch.

25 Days of Christmas Free Graphics Giveaway

Today marks the first day of our “25 Days of Christmas Free Graphics Giveaway”.

These are free for you to use for personal and business use, except for resale. Make sure to come back everyday for new graphics to download.

Steer Holiday Shoppers in the Right Direction

With the holiday shopping season in full force, have you prepared your small business website for the upcoming festivities? Now is the time to make sure you’re targeting the holiday market to maximize your company’s profitability this season.

Make sure your website is equipped with the best keywords for the job. Without key-wording your website properly, customers will not have very much luck when searching for the products or services you have to sell this holiday season. It’s perfectly acceptable to change keywords on your website around for the holidays to target those online shoppers. In fact, changing and experimenting with keywords in general is a smart part of small business website design.

What Do You Mean By Holiday Keywords?
You may already have valuable keywords present within the pages of your website. When you freshen your content for the holiday season, you want to put in popular words or phrases in that will help the general public locate your website easily in search engine results. Below are some popular holiday targeted keywords and phrasing that you may find will work for what your company’s website has to offer:

• Great Gifts Under $25
• Perfect Gifts for Dad
• Holiday Gift Ideas for 2010
• Affordable Christmas Gifts

As you can see, these are some very popular, yet generic search terms people will be using to locate gifts for their loved ones this year. You may ask “well should I use the word Christmas in my keywords?” That is completely up to you. Using Holiday in place of Christmas will get the same meaning across, but there are quite a few people who will use the term Christmas in search engines when looking to do online shopping. Studies show that businesses that use Christmas as a part of their marketing strategy are not really losing out on sales. Consider not only adding Christmas, but other terms like Hanukah or Kwanza to make your key phrases as well as your website looking well-rounded.

Three Reasons To Add A Blog To Your Website

If you’ve built a well-designed website for your small business, congratulations! You’re already ahead of the competition. Good small business website design is very important, yet browsing the Internet, I often can’t help but notice how poorly designed many websites are. A clean, bold design, easy navigation and high-quality content, along with basic search engine optimization of your website’s copy and title tags, will do wonders for your website and will help you strengthen your brand and establish yourself as a reputable business.

Now to the bad news. Just a decade ago, a great website was all you needed to establish your business online and to impress prospects. But things have changed dramatically over the past few years. Having a great, well-designed website isn’t enough anymore – you now need to have an interactive, social online presence. Customers, clients and prospects expect more these days from their online experience. They have come to expect interaction – they want to interact with you online, or at least have the option to do so.

To enable prospects to interact with you, you need to be active in social media, and one of the oldest forms of social media is also one of the best – blogging. Here are the three main reasons you should add a blog to your small business website – today.

1. Strengthening your brand. A well-written blog transforms your website from static to dynamic. It creates a vibrant website that keeps getting updated with fresh content, which gives visitors a reason to come back and also gives search engines a reason to crawl your website more often (more on SEO benefits in the next paragraph). You can use a blog to provide your visitors with new info, tips and ideas; to create a buzz around your website by posting contests and giveaways; and to give your customers and prospects a place where they can interact with you through voting, polls and comments.

2. SEO benefits. A blog gives you a wonderful opportunity to enrich your website with your main keywords. This is especially important for e-commerce websites that typically have very little content. When search engines are crawling your website, trying to index it correctly, they need to have something to work with – they need text that will tell them what your website is about and what are your main keywords. While your website’s URL and title tags provide search engines with the basic info, a blog reinforces that information and, overtime, can help you to rank better for many different keywords.

3. Your competitors are doing it. Even if you’re not convinced that your website needs a blog, but your competitors are adding blogs to their websites, this should be a good enough reason to add a blog too, especially if you know that customers in your space are participating in social media and reading blogs. If your competitors seem more up-to-date than you are, if their website is more fun and interesting, prospects will not hesitate to choose them over you.