There are numerous ways to increase your audience, target consumers, and grow your business without having to cut expenses. Website design, print design, and brand identity are the key components to making an impact and increasing sales. All of these elements point to executing a strong marketing and advertising campaign. With current economic conditions, marketing and advertising can be one of the first things to go, but they don’t have to be. Many times a company needs to find ways to increase business but cut their budget and the answer lies in the eye of the designer.

One of the best ways to save money and increase cliental is through a creative approach to design and strategic communication of brand identity. Brand clarity is something that is often compromised. When we think of brand development, marketing, and advertising we think of high costs. It’s not cheap to hire a design team or design firm to do an overhaul of marketing materials and ad campaigns. The age old saying that you have to spend money to make money is ever so true. The key is to find the right resources that will allow one to spend little money to make more money.

It’s quite often that freelance designers are overlooked. People feel that they don’t offer the quality of service that a large firm or team can offer. The truth is that is that they provide the same services and many times at a lower rate. Think of what one pays for when hiring a team or a firm for a project. They are paying the salaries of every person working on the project as well as the marketing and advertising of their company. The quality is the same and sometimes better when a talented freelance designer is involved. It makes sense. There are thousands of designers out there who offer a hybrid type of skill set and can provide every aspect of a marketing and advertising system.

Web design and the Internet have become a prominent force in today’s approach to increasing business growth. This is where it can begin to get expensive with SEO, functionality, and appeal. The best way to get what one wants within a given budget is to hire a freelance designer. They are able to do the same job and handle all aspects of a project without having to charge a “group rate”. A project means more to a freelance designer than a design team just pushing another project out the door and punching the clock. Quality and dedication are proven to be found more in a freelance designer.

If your business is looking for an affordable approach to expanding and improving your marketing strategy, support a freelance designer before engaging in the pricey tactics of a large design team or firm.

A client may not see behind the closed doors of a web page and most don't understand the coding and techniques for building a web page. This is where a designer can pull the wool over the client's eyes and charge for something they know little about or don't know at all. SEO is very time consuming, but if done right it is very effective. So what is a person to do to avoid getting blinded by deceitful web designers and developers?

First and foremost is to have rich content and lots of it. One way to know when you have enough content is to compare with your competitors. Make sure your information is relevant to what you are trying to accomplish with both search engines and more importantly providing visitors with useful material.

Within your content be sure to have useful keywords on the addressed topics. There are several resources that offer free keyword searches that will assist in choosing right ones. For instance, Google has an AdWords keyword search tool where you can type in topics and they provide keywords that are used the most when people search that topic. Keywords may seem obvious, but these tools will provide information on what keywords are being used and which ones you should be using.

Once you have your content and keywords it's basically up to a designer to do the rest. A well optimized website will have "meta tags" in the head of the HTML document that is your web page. These tags provide search engines with additional information about the page content, author, information, and instructions for the search bots. The most important is the "title" tag. This tag should have prominent keywords towards the beginning of the tag. The "meta name= description" tag is the snippet of information you see below each search result. These are perhaps the two most important meta tags that major search engines use. The "meta name= keywords" tag is helpful but often overlooked due to being abused. There are many other meta tags but most are not helpful and these are the important ones.

Now we know this much, what else is there? Besides the meta tag, the heading ("h") tag plays an important part in search engine optimization. A page can have up to 6 different heading tags. These tell search engine robots and spiders that the word or phrase within these tags are important and relevant to the page topic. It is good to use keywords inside these tags to place emphasis on them. Another way to produce emphasis on keywords and content is using bold letters ("strong" tag) and bullets ("li" and "ul" tags). Using these elements will help search bots recognize what is important and move you up in page ranks.

Being the client, how you can you tell if a designer or developer is doing their job up to this point? Look in the top portion of your web browser to the right of your browser tabs. There is a "Page" button with a drop-down arrow. When you click on that button and the drop-down appears, click on the view source section at the bottom. This will allow you to view the source code of the web page you are viewing. You will see (or should see) the "title" and "meta" tags at the top of the page. As you scroll down you should see heading tags (h1, h2, h3...) throughout the page placed on keywords and section headings. You should also find bold text and bullets for key points that can be seen just by looking at the web page.

There is one last point I will make that should help those who are paying for SEO find out if they are getting their money's worth and that is backlinking. Backlinking let's search engines know that your website is important. The more links to your website that are on other web pages the better. Hundreds or even thousands of backlinks will increase your page ranks significantly. It makes perfect sense really. If people are willing to link to you then it shows you are trustful and informative your website relate the most to what people are searching for. Backlinking drives traffic to your site, creates more business, and helps search engine rankings. There are resources such as the Free Traffic System that can assist in getting your link on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of web pages to improve search rankings. This is very important in increasing your spot on Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

Part 2 is coming soon so be sure to check back. The next article will cover what search engines hate and more about search engine optimization. This will help get you started.

Bryan Moore Creative Design offers professional quality website design, print design, and brand identity without the costs of an expensive design firm or an entire design team. Bryan specializes in web design including valid Search Engine Optimization (SEO 1.1) and verified HTML, XHTML markup, and CSS. Images are optimized for quicker downloading without taking away from their original quality. Print designs are completed in hi-res files for best results and high quality finishes. Bryan believes in only delivering the best there is and will go the extra mile to assure that his designs meet print house specifications and client's expectations.

Whether you are developing a new brand identity or refining an existing one, Bryan can help in every aspect so that you can reach your desired audience. Every aspect is covered from web solutions to printed marketing materials to help you grow and expand your client base. There is no need to outsource projects to different designers because Bryan brings it all to you.