How to build a portfolio...

[philjohns]

Many of you may know I have started doing various freelance work for graphic design...I have now "mastered" (take note of the quote marks) xhtml and css.

I want to bulk out my portfolio as quickly as possible...how would I go about doing this? I'm not keen on offering work for free as I know it doesnt do the industry of design any good so should I be offering my services at a reduced rate or will this not help either?

any ideas really appreciated.

Oh, and before anyone says "There's no such thing as a Get-Rich-Quick scheme" . . . its not necessarily what Im looking for

[Toon]

Search Engine Optimization all the way. Start locally, I have said this to a million people, if you live in Plymouth and you want to offer web design, a client has to be able to type in...

web design plymouth - Google Search

and you have to appear in the top 10 at least for a place like Plymouth because people don't want to search through loads of pages to find you. Doesn't matter if there's a few badly designed sites above you as long as your design stands out a mile.

Look at the sites that are top and see their coding, wording, use of meta tags, H1 H2 etc, title of pages and amount of keywords in the copy and you will see why they are placed there. You need plenty of text links saying web design plymouth pointing to your site from reputable places not free link directories.

Have enough detailed pages, good relevant content, a site map, blog maybe remember the more frequently the site is updated the more google will visit which is important if you want to put an offer out and get it indexed pretty quick.

The company that came top on my search doesn't have alot of text on the home page but take a peek at their sitemap and it will show you why they're near the top...

Minim Site Map

PS. you have 187 links on this site that say...

philjohnsimaging.co.uk

Nobody is searching for that, that would be a good start to update.

[philjohns]

What do you mean about the Minim Site Map - is it becuase it is soo simple?

And when you say...

PS. you have 187 links on this site that say...

philjohnsimaging.co.uk

Nobody is searching for that, that would be a good start to update.

I assume you mean change the link to be relevant...i.e.

Plymouth Website Design - Phil Johns Imaging

thanks for the info so far toon

[Toon]

That's correct about your signature.

The sitemap just shows google that every page is pointed to from the sitemap with url text that contains the words Website Design - Plymouth, Devon that's why they do well.

What people often missed about pagerank was you could get a PR4 with only having about 4 inbound links the rest was all to do with internal linking.

i.e. All pages should be reached from the home page in under 2 clicks. If your sitemap is reached from the home page in 1 click every other link is always only 2 clicks away no matter how deep it's buried.

Look at the sitemap on my site....

Centrereed's Sitemap

This can be reached from every page via the menu and even reached when javascript is turned off. Try it and turn javascript off and refresh the page you can still navigate the site because it's only 1 click away. Google note these factors and it's surprising how many "fully qualified" web designers miss these facts.

[philjohns]

Changing My Signature - Check!!

Im just finishing off the updates to my sites slight redesign so I'll create my sight map afterwards...should I link to my sitemap from everypage? and can it just be a .html file or does it need to be .xml?

[Toon]

I use both, the internal site map is for

a) If you use javascript, for visitors who don't use it
b) To show spiders the interal linking from one page

The external xml sitemap that you should register with yahoo and google will tell them the minute something gets updated on your site and they will send spiders when needed.

If your site is not too big use this to create the xml file

ROR Sitemap Generator

[Toon]

Originally Posted by philjohns

Changing My Signature - Check!!

You rank no. 1 for 'Phil Johns Imaging' and I'm guessing always will unless another Phil Johns starts Imaging so by using it in links, title tags etc. You're only watering down the title keywords by using it.

[philjohns]

Improving My Signature - Check!! lol

This is really helpful Toon. Once my site is finished I'll go through my keywords...Ive had a quick look at the top 10 sites for the google search of "plymouth website design" and mine are definately very different!!

Ive tried putting my website url into the sitemap generator you suggested using but it didnt seem to work...any idea why?

[Toon]

1st thing I noticed is you have your analytics script in the head when it should be one of the last things in the body...

Read you analytics account and it should say...

Copy the following code block into every webpage you want to track immediately before the tag.