Branding for the new business owner

Your brand can be your business' most important asset. A strong brand can make any business stand out from the crowd. Every time a customer comes into contact with your business, your brand image will create an impression on them.

To create a successful brand, you can work with designers on everything from the look and feel of your website to the design of your stationery. Your brand should project a consistent and distinctive image of your business.

It is important to understand design, its relationship with branding and what it can do for your business.

While branding and brand building are complex, strategic activities, there is almost always a vital creative design component too - for example, the Nike 'swoosh', which is a simple, yet effective, logo that conveys energy and movement, and is appropriate to a company that makes performance sportswear.

Graphic design is one type of design that can create a brand image for your business. If you sell products, you can also design the look and feel of the retail environment in which you choose to market them, whether on a website, in a franchise in a department store or in a shop of your own. You could employ a retail designer or a website designer to help you determine the look and functionality of your retail environment, and to ensure that it communicates your business' brand essence.
Websites are increasingly important for many businesses to reach new customers and keep existing ones so it's important to have a brand that works online. Potential customers make emotional buying decisions based on website design and imagery.

Larger companies will have specific brand guidelines that their web designers will need to incorporate, which dictate style, colours and fonts, and how and where the logo can be positioned.

Small businesses will often need to start developing their brand from scratch, including designing a logo. A web designer can often help you with all of your branding needs.

Your corporate identity is made up of the visible elements of your business, including:

•     logo
•     business and brand names
•     any specific colours you use in your logo,   branding, premises, etc
•     letterhead
•     advertising
•     packaging
•     website
•     retail environment or office

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Backlinks and your Website

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned Dogs, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about Sports. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine's algorithm. Lately, however, a search engine's criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.

Another reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can't build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way webmasters got the word out used to be through reciprocal linking.
Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts. We hope you have a better understanding of why you need good quality inbound links to your site, and have a handle on a few helpful tools to gain those links.

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