How does your logo stand up to the competition? Even more importantly, is your logo doing it’s job? You logo is more then just some image to put on your letterhead; it is your identity, your face, your first impression to the market.

Many companies spend tens of thousands of dollars or more on a logo. Nike or Macintosh have huge budgets just for marketing their logo. What can you possible do to maximize you logos’ impression, without spending the kind of money IBM does?

OneVision, a British marketing company gives this advice:

Developing a quality logo is not a simple task. Imagine trying to boil down all of your personality traits, interests, hobbies, and activities into one sentence that describes who you are as a person. It would require a good bit of soul searching, introspection, and prioritizing, wouldn’t it?

Well, the same is required of your company when you create a logo. Your agency can make the process run smoothly by asking the right questions, but be prepared to commit the time and resources necessary to produce a quality result. Work with your agency to figure out what makes sense for your budget and your situation, but just to give a ballpark, allocating 5 - 10% of your overall marcom budget to corporate identity is not uncommon.

A good logo is going to to give your company a clean, professional look. The cleaner and more stylish your logo, the better your chances are of standing out amongst the others in the industry. Don’t forget, it is important to keep your logo fresh as times change. It is normal for a company that has been in business for many years, or decades to change it’s logo from time to time. Maybe it is time to update yours?

Keywords are a very important part of optimizing your Web site for SEO. Keywords are words or phrases that people enter into their favorite search engine in order to find what ever it is they are looking for. If your site is relevant to their search, and you have wisely chosen your keywords, you have an advantage over the Web site that didn’t.

Keywords need to be found in various parts of your site, including:
Page title
Page content
Meta tags (These are in the source code for your site.)

You need to understand what people are searching for before you get started. Here are some steps to get you on your way:
1) Make a list of every word or phrase you think people would use to find you.
2) Think of common misspellings for your words and include those on your list.
3) Think about variations of words, for instance, if the may be hyphenated or have spaces.
4) You may want to ask someone who isn’t an expert in your field to give you some words they would use in a search for your products or services.

Your list may be getting long now, but don’t worry, we are going to thin it out in a moment.

You should now look through your list and decide what words are the best for your site. There are also tools you can use to help you with this.

Wordtracker - http://www.wordtracker.com/ is very popular. Starting at $8.00*/day - it is really a great value

KeywordDiscovery -
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ - offers software to help you manage a myriad of your SEO efforts. This software is reasonably priced at around $300.00*.

You can always search your favorite search engine for “Keyword Suggestion Tool” or something to that affect.

Now that you have narrowed your keywords it is time to write or re-write your site content. You want to use these choice keywords as often as possible on your site, as long as they are relevant and not repetitive. This will help your keyword density. Keyword density is the number of keywords used on your page divided by total words on the page. As a general rule, high keyword density is good for SEO.

Once you have good relevant keywords and good keyword density, you are well on your way to strengthening the SEO efforts for your site. This will lead to better organic searches and in combination with other SEO efforts, you can soon find yourself on the first page of many search engines.

There are so many things involved in getting your site optimized for search engines. How can you stay on top of all the rules for being SEO’ed? Here are a few resources I would suggest:

What is SEO?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

Other resources:
http://www.seochat.com/
http://www.seroundtable.com/
http://www.selfseo.com/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/

The most important thing about running a website and keeping it up-to-date is staying current with new web standards and following through with all your SEO tasks.

Don’t forget the importance of having links to your site from as many relevant websites that you can. Advertising on those sites or offering link exchanges will help your Google rating as well. Ever wonder what a Google Page Rank is, and how it works? Here is some great information on that topic:

http://www.google.com/technology/
http://www.google-pagerank.net/

Good luck!

Kevin