The band wanted to enter the online world with a very simple website, together with a powerful social media strategy. The main goal was to start acquiring new clients through the web in less than 1 month.

To achieve these challenging objectives, a facebook page was developed and an Adwords campaigned was launched with a very exciting budget.

Visit: www.bollywoodliveband.com

This project consisted on the development of website with a very similar look and feel as the CEPEN one, but better prepared for content updates: new articles, new documents, etc.

The following items were defined for this design and consulting project:

• Design of a new brand and template;
• Coding of a new and dynamic website, prepared for regular updates;
• Optimization of the website for search engines.

Multimedia:

Visit: www.cepen.org

New facebook and twitter pages were developed and promoted to the current readers.

Work items:
- Design of a new template;
- Social networking study; design and launch of new twitter and facebook official pages;
- Optimization of the website for search engines.

Multimedia:

Visit: www.jogodearea.com

This project consisted on the development of an ultra-light website, extremely informative, and where the updates would be a constant. The result was a magazine-style site, low on images and with a structure that allows visitors to see a lot of information simultaneously.

The following items were defined for this design and consulting project:

• Optimization of a the current logo;
• Coding of a new and dynamic website, prepared for regular updates;
• Optimization of the website for search engines.

Visit: www.cepen.org

EasyRoommate is a leader flatshare service in several countries – like France, or UK – and their blog had the main goal of putting all their markets together, in an unique, informal website.

And so was born the EasyRoommate.blog, a fresh, colorful, dynamic website for all the flat and roommates.

Visit: www.EasyRoommateBlog.com

The following items were defined for this design and consulting project:

• Design of a new brand, to be spread throughout the organization;
• Coding of a new and dynamic website, prepared for regular updates;
• Optimization of the website for search engines;
• Plan of a web marketing strategy, according to a specific 1 year budget.

Visit: www.energiasportal.com

It has been a pleasure working with this project, specially to certify its enormous growth and acceptance throughout the blogging Portuguese community.

Work items:

• Design of a new brand;
• Coding of a new and dynamic website, prepared for regular updates;
• Optimization of the website for search engines.

Visit: www.jogodearea.com

First of all, I was impressed with the fact that the plugin recognizes a user that accesses the website through the iPhone, automatically showing the correct template. The design is simple and effective (check the image on the left hand side), and customizable like any other wordpress template. On the settings page, you can insert your analytics ID an edit some of the style and color options. You can also add an adsense advert, as the template is prepared to show google ads with the right proportions.

WPtouch is definitely an amazing free solution to get into one of the most advanced promotion channels out there, the iPhone, as we know one of the trendiest gadgets in the market. Install the plugin, give it your special touch, promote it on your website, and you’re surely on the right direction, marketing-wise. Give it a try – click here to visit the website.

Most of web users still don’t understand the true concept behind Twitter (why telling other people what you’re doing at one exact moment, right?), but the fact is that Twitter is one of web’s top channels to promote your website, make no mistake. Even if you don’t like it, use it for your blog’s sake! I personally find it extremely valuable, to promote new tools, good news or articles (even if I’m not their author). You can both promote them yourself, or simply use a cool wordpress plugin that will do the job for you.

Another great practice is to offer your readers a simple and effective way for them to promote your posts. By installing, for example, the “Sociable” plugin, a few links to your favorite social bookmarking sites will be added to each of your posts, pages, or RSS feeds (all of this being totally customizable). You can choose from dozens of social network websites, and it couldn’t be easier for your blog readers!

It may sound silly and obvious but.. always write your own content! That way, you can promote your own writing, your own ideas, and really leave your mark. By coping other people’s content (even if referring their original source) you’re not creating your blog, but just repeating information that is already published somewhere else. Be unique, smart, attentive, and try to promote your blog by showing your readers that you write about “hot” topics. Use plugins and widgets on a balanced way (make sure that all of your content is easy to access, simple and clean).

Here are some good examples of tools that you may want to adopt to your blog (obviously depending on each concept and market niche). Use them together with the other recommendations that I’ve been doing on this section’s previous posts.

• WP Related Posts: this plugin prints some links to other posts within the same topic (based on your tags). Of course you can also manually run a ‘related posts’ section also by simply ending your article with other relevant things you’ve written that readers might like to check out;
• OpenID Comments for Wordpress: by using this plugin, your users will be allowed to use OpenID for authentication;
• WP-Polls: build some interactivity into your blog by creating several polls (same of them can be short-term polls, but others can last for several months). With this plugin, you can print the polls randomly, anytime that a page is refreshed.
• Popularity Contest: this plugin counts the number of views, comments and trackbacks for each of your posts, to basically create your “best of”. This is an extremely interesting tool, as blog readers usually feel attracted to the most popular or most visited links.

Feel free to tell us your experiences with wordpress, and perhaps suggest some other tools that you’ve been using with success. See you next time!

At this moment, you’re thinking.. “well, it sounds interesting, I will be promoting my website, for free, and in exchange I’ll just have to offer the other guy a tiny space on my website. It is in fact cool to have some “sponsors” on my website!”. All of those facts are absolutely true, however, by link exchanging you will be doing far more than that! What most people that work in the web know as a fact (or should know at least) is that search engines love inbound links (links on external pages that are linking back to your website). In fact, they love them so much that inbound links have a big share of whats needed to improve your site’s ranking. If you look at the Alexa ranking of a powerful chain of websites, for instance in the travel industry, you’ll find out that their web ranking is massively improved not only for the tons of content and traffic that they may have, but also because of all the linking between all the website “branches”.

Going into a bit of detail, how can we measure the quality and consistency of a link exchange? Well, there are several things to have in mind:

• First of all, will you be exchanging a banner or a text link? A banner can obviously be a prettier solution, but having a text link can be as good or even better than the banner, for the simple fact that for the crawlers this is all about keywords!
• If you have a bad quality banner, don’t know how to design and have no other chance but to use an ugly image, go for the text link. Make sure that your main keywords are on the link title, and you have done a good job.
• Link exchange is most of the times a good practice, however, it is specially great if you are exchanging links with a website within your market, niche, or geographical location. Imagine that you have a travel website, organized by cities. If you’re exchanging links with a website in a similar position, make sure that you have several targeted links, per city page (e.g. “Travel Guides London” on the London page, and “Travel Guides Manchester” on the Manchester’s specific page).
• If you already have a powerful brand to promote, make sure that you analyse the quality of your partner. If the guy is only starting with his business, perhaps a free link exchange is not the way to go, as his website will be far better pushed, with your higher visits, pageviews and web rank.
• So what can we consider a good link exchange? Using my own website as an example, I would include the main keywords, and probably my own brand to make it consistent – “Rui F Zamith – web marketing and design”. Google will be automatically associating these keywords with the url www.rfzamith.com – the “Rui F Zamith” is technically not important, as I’m not gonna be fighting with other websites for that keyword, but it will make the title look more apealing.

These are, on my point of view, the essential “things-to-know” about link exchange. Make sure you have them in mind while managing your web relations, and feel free to leave your comments!