Websites and promoting your business

[Helvetica]

Listen, forget about meta tags and search engines for now.

I'm a graphic designer. A few years ago I designed a beautiful CMS online shop for a client selling golf gear. 6 months later she was wondering why the sales weren't clocking up while she slept. He problem wasn't SEO - if you searched for 'ladies gingham golf bag' you would arrive at her website, but her clients need to know her product existed first.

As others have mentioned, social media is important. Photography is important. But you need to make it personal. I would love to read about what motivates you, what got you started your craft. A short paragraph about how your grandad passed down his stanley bedrock and you still use it every day, that kind of stuff!

Facebook could be vital for your type of business. Can I assume most of your clients will be within a 50 mile area? Join local groups and you can promote each other. Get people to like your page, then keep it updated with interesting images, info, whatever. It should be constantly evolving. A good 'sticky' website will give someone a reason to come back to it every so often. Otherwise, it's just a brochure.

Local print ads can still work, especially for older clients, but for €25 or so you can promote a Facebook post for a week, limited to your locale. It's powerful stuff.

SEO has changed and is much more organic. Search engines are looking for content not keywords. Your customers are too.

Nice work by the way!

 

[tool-me-up]

Tool-me-up,

You really shouldn't be advising people on this, because you are years behind. Seriously.

When I said: "Google does not disclose inbound links via that method"; it was not a 'good find' by me.

I have used it to check my site so it cant be more than say 5 months at most since it was stopped ( penguin update ?) According to Google its still a valid operator https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/55281?hl=en


Maybe you can take him through the ins and outs of SEO seeing how 90% of online guides are for pre - penguin some even advise to BUY backlinks in bulk!?

I have given him the very basics - which obviously still work - if you want to argue the fact they don't work put "tool me up" in bing yahoo or google and I will be page one by doing simply what I posted earlier.

 

[Mr_P]

Tool me up,

You are indeed top but maybe its just luck or typing three words in.

Type my business name into google and my ebay is half way down, my website is top of page 2.

Click English only and things improve I'm second and fourth.

Type Carl and my business name into google and my website is 1st and 2nd and ebay doesn't get a mention (lacks my name).

I have done bugger all marketing as the main part of my business hasn't launched yet.

 

[tool-me-up]

wasnt that long ago I didnt rank at all for tool me up , you had to insert the dashes as per my domain name to find me.
Searching tool me up ( before I made those changes brought up, amazon silhouette tool, a couple of youtube videos, tooled-up.com and a few other queries but none mine.) By doing what I said in earlier posts I ranked very easily for tool me up.

If OP picks a low-ish competition search term, adjusts the title, description and has his search term in plain writing ( not hidden in html and not an image) on each page he will rank very quickly for that term.
The description is mainly for the users rather than search engines - I just thought it could with a slight re-word to sound more inviting when it appears in search results.

Also matched words, i.e custom, furniture, ireland will display bold so will attract more attention when browsing results - ( sounds irrelevant but think about it )

There is lots of competition for the words furniture, bespoke, and custom. Putting them together with Ireland creates a low competition phrase which is still searchable i.e not so unique no-one thinks of searching it.

This where I fall off with search terms like socket set, spanner set, combi hammer drill etc as there are literally millions of competitive pages and big companies pouring hundreds of ££ into staying at the top.

Going against the competition to rank purely on custom furniture would require a lot of knowledge and time or a lot of ££ either way I would jump on the chance to take advantage of the Ireland bit.