I’ve created a couple of these for colleagues already, and would be excited to offer this service to anyone.  Imagine the creative possibilities and themes that could be included in a piece like this.  Contact me today for an estimate and free initial consultation.

Click here to see my latest graphic design, web design, and video portfolio.

I’ll be adding even more soon!

I am a freelance and full time graphic designer, web designer, multimedia and video design editor working in the Minneapolis metro area. Contact me for a consultation or quote on your project today.

What factors rank a website in the Google search results?

• Most experts still say that one of the greatest advantages websites often have in SEO is that they have a lot of external links from other sites that are high-quality, relevant, and have good page rank. It’s important to build links to your site from other sites, but only if it makes sense to do so. It needs to be a quality, established source (not a “link farm” or a place where everyone pays to get listed for no real good reason). Diversity and quality of those links is way more important than quality. So if you spend all of your time for a month trying to convince a strong popular partner site to link to you, and a month to add your link to 10 tiny unknown sites, focus on that strong partner first.
• Domain authority is important. How many years have you registered your domain? How many years have you had it? It’s a good practice to register it for as many years as you can afford (which isn’t a lot of money these days).
• Put anchor text on those images. Maybe you didn’t design your site, and you have no idea what this means. This is behind the scenes, in the code. People see an image, but Google just sees a filename which often doesn’t describe what the image is very well. You or your web designer can add some text to the code associated with that image describing what it says using the keywords you are targeting in search.
• 301 redirects. Make sure http://yourwebsite.com/ redirects to http://www.yourwebsite.com/ – This is something that needs to be done on the server or with htaccess and is a really quick fix.
• Fresh content. These days, the Google algorithms add a lot more weight to fresher content from blogs or social sharing. Write a blog, and don’t write that blog like you’d write a press release. Write it like a fun, conversational, more personal tone and keep those blog posts short and frequent. Any business can blog, I’m sure you have something to say about your business.
• SEO friendly URLs are great to have. Search engines will be able to gather more keyword relevance from a page like http://www.yourwebsite.com/product-name-here than http://www.yourwebsite.com/page1.
• On the topic of URL titles, it’s also key to have good page titles. Make sure the name of each page seen in the browser window’s title bar isn’t the same across the website, and that each title describes each page with important, relevant keywords. Not only does this add more keywords to your site, it is the title of listings people see in Google search results. So it’s clearly a critical to make sure you have the right keywords in place here. But it’s also important to make sure you don’t abuse it. I’ll be honest, I was working on a site and got a little carried away with the keywords in page titles. They weren’t irrelevant, there were just too many, and Google obviously didn’t like that.
• Internal linking – make sure your important keywords link to other parts of your site. If you’re talking about the WidgetBurner2000 product on a few pages on your site, make sure whenever you say WidgetBurner2000 it is a hyperlink to the page that is exclusively about WidgetBurner2000. This helps Google understand that WidgetBurner2000 is an important keyword on your site, and it will make your site more relevant on that word when searching for it in Google.
• Pay Per Click campaigns don’t really do much for your organic ranking, but it’s still a good thing to do if there’s a lot of PPC competition on keywords you target. I’d advise everyone not to spend the money advertising on your company name – unless for some reason you aren’t already ranking #1 on it. With that said, if you already have top 5 rank on keywords in organic search, you probably don’t need to invest a lot in them for PPC, spend the money on the keywords you aren’t seen for.

These are just a few of the many things a website needs to do. There’s a lot of other stuff to focus on from meta tags to how your site was built (text better than flash/images/etc). Again, every site is unique and will need a different approach. It will have strengths and weaknesses and there are always a few areas that needs to be the primary focus. It’s important to know that discovering, strategizing and implementing SEO for a website is time consuming, needs a little trial and error testing, and there needs to be a good awareness of what competitors are doing. So you need someone in your corner doing the detail work for you. Sure, this is something you can work on over time, but wouldn’t you rather be out there innovating instead of trying to get off the ground on what you already have? Just get the SEO over with, and focus on the other things that really matter.

How does a small business compete with large businesses in Google search results?

This is a great question. I’ve had a lot of experience with large business websites, and smaller websites have some very specific advantages in SEO.

Larger websites have a lot of great opportunities to build links with other high page ranking partner websites. They also give a lot of great opportunities for internal linking because there is so much diverse content to work with and it often links together well. Content is big and these sites have a lot of it, tackling it all can be daunting at first because there is so much, but with the beauty of today’s CMS technology with integrated SEO extensions and modules, a good system can be put in place that makes things easier to manage for everyone.

Smaller websites have the advantage of being so unique geographically and in their products/services. Geographic keywords are huge, because people will definitely be searching for specific things within specific proximities. Small businesses generally generate more of a loyal following, because people love to follow independent businesses. I find that small sites succeed well with social sharing, and blogs on these sites generally generate a lot of interest. It’s easier to tackle the technical SEO issues on these sites because there is less to work with, but it’s so easy to get set up to generate a lot of fresh unique content full of good keywords.

These differences between big and small are also specifically how the two businesses can compete with each other by tackling the specific advantages each has. Wal-Mart may have a leg up on size, content, and page rank, but the small business will find advantages over them on geography, specific niche keywords, and the uniqueness and frequency of fresh content.

A funny memory from that summer gig was when one of the older employees started calling for me frantically. Their computer screen had gone blank! I touched the mouse and magically, it was fixed. Their screen saver had turned on…

I came to Minnesota the end of September for the graphic design program at The Art Institutes. I was definitely a fish out of water in the city, but I got up to speed and have always felt at home here. The faster pace suits me well.

I launched this website a year later, in October 2002, so dustinmarson.com is seeing a big milestone next year as well. That launch was the start of my freelance work, so I’m about to make the 10 year club as a freelance designer in the industry.

10 years ago was an exciting time for me, and it has been a successful and highly educational decade. Here’s hoping the next one goes even better.

On the downside, I think this gives me less control over the software I’m paying my hard-earned dollars for. With this, I’m still paying several hundred dollars a year for software that I don’t really own. There would be no more disc sitting in a drawer somewhere that I can take out and reinstall on a computer whenever I please, a couple years after I paid for it. Once I stop paying, I can’t use it anymore, even though I invested several hundred dollars. That’s a tough thing to let go of.

On the upside, this is great for those folks who upgrade every version. But I usually skip every other version. I mean come on, CS5.5 seems obnoxiously soon to me. Subscription pricing would have made that much easier and much less frustrating to have to fork over money again so soon. I think the best case for this new subscription pricing is design shops who hire contractors and just want to pay for software for a few months.

Overall, I think it’s probably a good direction for software pricing to be headed, but I’m still all about owning my software & media – so it’s probably not something i’ll be adopting in my future software purchasing just yet. Well, hopefully I’ll still have a choice in a couple years because I’m sure Adobe likes having this control.

While this list may be a big “DUH” for most advanced designers, I think it will help some of those design students or even non-designers who haven’t had a chance to explore that Font menu (or beyond the Font menu).  I’m talking about the people who might be stuck on the M$ Office defaults that they’ve always been told to use. I’m also talking about those junior designers who just haven’t had time to explore beyond “Myriad” (the Adobe Illustrator default) in the font menu.  You can usually tell it is a Junior Designer’s work when everything uses Myriad.  Trust me, my first portfolio site used a lot of Myriad.  It’s a shame, really – Myriad is a nice font.

I have a lot of fonts I like to use in more creative pieces, but there are some standard go-to fonts everyone should try for a serious corporate design piece.  Below are fonts that major corporations use all the time because they are timeless and professional.  None of these are too obscure and shouldn’t be too hard to come by, many may already be on your computer.

Top 10 For Print:

1. Helvetica Neue

2. Adobe Garamond Pro

3. Gill Sans

4. Futura

5. Century Gothic

5. Clarendon

6. Bodoni

7. Frutiger

9. DIN

10. Dax Condensed

Top 5 for Web:

1. Tahoma

2. Trebuchet MS

3. Verdana

4. Arial

5. Georgia

Honorable Mention: Times New Roman.  There’s really nothing wrong with it, I don’t hate TNR.  It’s just good to get away from the default sometimes – which is why it was hard to include Arial, but I needed to include it because you can’t really go wrong with Arial or Helvetica.

In short, try to get beyond Myriad when you start designing in Adobe Creative Suite and while there’s nothing wrong with Arial and Times New Roman, thinking beyond these fonts will improve your designs so much.  Use Helvetica instead of Arial when you can, and never ever use Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Brush Script.  These fonts have been used to death by non-designers everywhere and have no place in a professional design.  Heck, even cartoonists shouldn’t use Comic Sans at this point, it’s gotten that overused.