PowerBand Graphics LLC – Custom Websites, Cutting Edge Graphics

Everyone deserves to have the best web and logo design possible. Whether you are a small business in Nebraska, Iowa or Minnesota or a larger corporation; PowerBand Graphics can provide you with cutting edge graphics solutions at small town cost.

Consumers have seemingly endless information at their fingertips these days but are your customers finding you when they need to? PowerBand Graphics knows the hard work that small businesses have to put in to obtain and maintain clientele. Just because your business is small doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be connected with the latest technology and have the absolute best cutting edge designs to represent you.

This is the service PowerBand Graphics provides. Drop us a line to see what kind of services we can provide for you.

Another month has come and gone which means another Strictly Business cover! It’s been a busy month but I’ve got new blog posts and updates on the way. The featured business on this issue is TCW Construction with the photo once again provided by Shane & Sunny Photography.

You may have heard the terms SEO and SEM thrown around a bit while looking to promote your business online. They refer to Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. This is the practice of leveraging search engines like Google, Bing and Ask.com to advertise your company. It’s a big subject and important for small businesses to consider. SEO and SEM aren’t the same, they have important differences that I’ll outline.

I’ve worked with enough marketing departments and created enough websites that I realize how important it is to have knowledge of these methods. SEO and SEM have become buzzwords that companies (both legitimate and fraudulent) use to lure individuals in with the promise of cheap guaranteed web traffic. As a lot of things with marketing your business it requires a lot of work and there’s no silver bullet.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the volume of traffic to your website by organic search results. By organic we mean this the traffic you get when someone types in a keyword into a search engine like Google and your business appears in the results. This type of success in search results is ideal because it is the result of automatic indexing by search engines and is free. Free is good and free marketing is even better. This is not always easy to achieve and there are a lot of factors to take into account when you want to increase your page rank. Unfortunately you can’t just flip a switch and have your business fall under the first page, it’s hard work and there’s a lot of competition to do the very same thing.

Chief among the factors to consider is having a well coded, semantically correct website with relevant content that search engines can index. Having your website built correctly and the code laid out in a way that search engines prefer goes a long way to your first step on the road to SEO. Having other websites link to your site can also increase your page rank. There are also things you can do wrong that can negatively affect your ranking and even get you delisted. This is known as “Black Hat SEO” and it includes things like hiding text by coloring it the same as the background.

Let’s get back to content. Content is huge. If you aren’t providing relevant information to your business then your business will have that much more trouble getting indexed. Search engines LOVE freshly updated information, that’s one of the reasons blogs have gotten so popular. Not only is it a fantastic way to connect with your audience but having constantly updated relevant information is GOLD for search engines.

Now let’s move on to Search Engine Marketing. This is the process by which you pay for your presence online. There are a couple different methods to do this. One is called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, these are the text ads you see on search result pages usually off to the left or right of the search results. You set a budget and you get charged only when someone clicks your ad. These require consistent monitoring and upkeep to make sure you are getting the most of them but can be very beneficial to your online presence. Paid Inclusion is also a method to increase your page results and involved paying a fee to be included in search engine indexes. Paid inclusion is provided by most search engine companies, the most notable exception being Google.

So there’s some basic information for you to mull over. It’s a lot to know and there’s plenty of information that I haven’t even begun to touch upon but it’s good for any small business owner to know more. Search Engine Marketing can be a daunting and exhausting task but the benefits are worth it. Your website is the lifeblood of your business, it’s crucial that your prospective and current clients be able to find you. Go ahead and shoot me a message if you want to know more.

Hey everyone, once again I’ve been working with the good folks at Strictly Business creating cover designs for their publication. This month I had the good fortune to create Lincoln and Omaha’s covers. The theme was “Going Green” so we decided to take a different approach and create a more illustrative design, highlighting multiple businesses. Feel free to comment and look for the magazine if you are a small business owner or just curious.