Redesigning your personal brand in a weekend

This post was supposed to be live last Monday, but missed the chance. In anticipation of some of the conferences that I am going to. I decided to (finally) change the homepage design for Alex Designs LLC over last weekend, plus create some new business cards. I am very self-conscious of my own design work, so I didn't want to do anything that was over the top. Just keep the design simple and meet my objectives.

The objectives of my personal brand are:

1. Improve the exposure of my brand and my blogs through RSS
2. Show off some of the great work my company has been doing
3. Stream my connections through social networks
4. Improve my network of peers and social friends
5. Launch new initiatives
   

Keeping it simple and accessible

My old site was built in 2003, plus I built that one in a weekend as well. But it was probably one of the first sites that I built in CSS. So the code was pretty bad. Now the code is not 100% perfect yet on this site, but it is a lot cleaner and it getting closer to being valid. So far I fixed all the layout bugs. Then I can do a mobile version too.

My Challenges

1. Merge 3 areas of interest into my personal brand identity
2. Promote 3 different RSS feeds
3. Try not to screw up my search engine rankings
4. Anticipate Launch a podcast
   

The 3 areas of interest I focus on are Landing Page Design, eCommerce Web Design and then my blog, which covers anything I am interested in. By focusing on these areas as separate sites, I have built my niche in 3 separate verticals. This help when your readers are various types of marketers/consultants, business owners and my peers. Each of the sites are blogs dedicated to the keywords for each of the topics. This should help with search engine optimization and helping people choose what they want to read or subscribe to.

Create it quickly and build from there

My theory has always been this way. I really just didn't want to spend a lot of time on this rebranding exercise. It is just a foundation for me to build on and it works for me. Since I put this new deisgn up last weekend, I have already started a new podcast and added it to my navigation. Even the podcast I put together very quickly. Yea, I am not the best speaker, but I needed to jump into it and get it out there. Then build on my podcasting skills as well.

Have any thoughts? Give me your feedback...

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Move Web Pages Without Losing SEO Ranking

For the last few weeks, I have been trying to transfer some search engine keyword rankings from my old blog to a new niche blog I created for Landing Pages. Take a look at these Google results here. As displayed in the graphic, Alex Designs is listed with two results for that keyword. Obviously, it would be stupid to screw this up.

My Approach

I created a blog post on the new web site that targets the keywords Landing Page Design and moved over the original content. Then all the previous links to this old post were changed to the new URL. Plus I added a server side 301 redirect to the old page. This strategy should transfer over the Google Ranking, plus the web traffic for my new blog.

There are several more pages like this that I need to complete. First, I am testing this page transfer, because it has the least traffic for this batch of keywords. If this is successful, I will then start to move over my remaining pages, one by one to build a new web presence for my new blog.

It's time consuming, but this is my way of moving web pages without losing SEO Ranking. What do you think?

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