1. Optimize

There are all kinds of ways you can promote your online business but ranking well in the search engines is paramount. If you do not show up in Google searches, you can forget any amount of significant traffic. Now, you should know up front that the precise manner in which search engines rank your website and others is a closely guarded secret, however there are a few things known simply from trial and error. Here are a few terms you should know to get you started.

• Search Engine Optimization – Making your site as appealing to the search engines as possible. This is a process of writing content and structuring your site in order to get the most favorable ranking possible. Includes the use of keywords, metatags, backlinks, links and more.
• Keyword research – A popular word or phrase that people use to find information on the internet. For your website, it should be a phrase highly searched relating to your product or service.
• Backlinks – Do follow links on another site pointing back to yours. These will affect your page rank in Google and other search engines.
• Social Media – a rising form of free website promotion it entails using popular social forums such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others to promote a website to a larger audience.

2. Content

If you want to push, your site to the top of the search engines content is king! The days of using thousands of keywords sprinkled in with useless information are over, thank goodness. Content can be written articles or blurbs on your site that provide users with credible and useful information.  The rule of thumb is to write for humans with the search engines in mind.

3. Social Media

Tweet it, post it to FaceBook or MySpace and watch your traffic increase! Social media has become the best marketing tool available, people come to these sites to connect with old friends and make new ones so there is always some activity going on! Create a business account and begin sharing information and specials with your online “friends”. Potential customers can learn a little about your business and benefit from exclusive online only offers.

4. Newsletter

This may be time consuming but a newsletter remains one of the best tools at your disposal for free website promotion. Supply an easy opt in button on your site, perhaps you can provide something free in exchange for customers signing up for your newsletter. Then on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, send out a quick overview of what is new in your industry, special deals, quick tips or anything your customer base would find interesting.

5. Get Help

Now that you know a little more about free website promotion, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed. If you are concerned about your ability to do any of the above you should know, there are services out there that can help you. Here are a few options:

• Link Builders – you can find plenty of individuals and businesses online who provide this service.
• Content creation – this is big business online at the moment. You pay someone to ghost write your content.
• SEO firms – Companies that provide all phases of search engine optimization.

As you can imagine the above options can get quite expensive, and rightfully so, through these efforts you stand to make a great deal of money. However many new businesses simply cannot bear the brunt of this expense. Thankfully, there are sites like Work For Favor.  Here you can request all kinds of SEO for your website in exchange for your time and energy on other projects. No money is required at all!

Be Patient

The millions of eBooks that claim anyone can attract a large social media fanbase in a matter of days are offering false promises in return for a sale. While their methods might attract bots or people who are trying to build their own group of followers, these techniques will not reach your target market.

Nothing but time and engaging material will earn a group of followers for your company that could turn into actual customers. Be patient, build your content, answer questions, and your followers will show up.

Aimee blogs for LiveSilverPrices.net, the best source of silver prices on the web. LiveSilverPrices.net is updated daily with new tutorials and guides about buying silver.

There are several companies and individuals on the internet that sells high resolution textures and it’s usual that they cost big money, but when the budget is low we need to start searching for alternatives. Finding free textures isn’t easy, and even with the resolution of today’s cameras the free textures out there are just of very bad quality. But today I want to share a nice resource where you can find high quality textures for free and you’ll be able to download them without any registration.

According to the few file’s info and EXIF information, the textures from the site High Resolution Textures are created using a Canon EOS 400D, a pretty nice digital camera in the prosumer market.

There are many very nice textures to choose from. This is a resource that must have a place in our bookmark.

It is undeniable that one of the most important element in a successful graphic design has something to do with the font type you use to spread the message and sometimes, when you need to find the right fonts you don’t have it on your local system. Here is where AllMyFonts comes to help you. With more than 128,000 free fonts in TTF format, AllMyFonts.com is one of the biggest fonts resource you can find on the net.

AllMyFonts service started few months ago as a personal project to organize those 128,000 fonts, then the site gone online but in a few days our shared hosting service deactivated it due to the high load. The site then has been removed and after few months of code optimization and caching it’s online again on a big server that guarantees an efficient and fluid service.

AllMyFonts bring you an excellent preview system where you can type any text for a given font to see how it looks. Downloads are completely free without registration of any kind. We also offer a search engine to browse all the fonts.

Note two important things. One is that AllMyFonts is on heavy work at this time, we are classifying in categories all those fonts and the other thing is that AllMyFonts is part of our site’s network. Despite these two details, I think that it perfectly fits to have a post here because its free nature and its graphic related service.

We hope that you enjoy and have fun using this big and great resource considering the very big work that we put on the site’s engine code and the hardware resources needed for this site to work properly.

What about a website that offers tons of graphic related resources? ShareCG is one of them, with thousands of resources in categories like tutorials, 3d models, materials, textures, animations, software, plugins, photography, poser stuff among others. All these resources for absolutely free and uploaded by their authors.

You must register to be able to download, but it’s worth the extra time registering if you can put your hands on so many wonderful resources.

free-PSD is a website that offers awesome templates in PSD format for absolutely free with the only condition to put a link back to their site, pretty fair considering the high quality of the templates offered.

No registration required to download any file. The PSD files are of very high quality in a professional grade and they are even sliced so you can save as separated images to build and customize your own variation of any template.

The templates can be found at free-PSD.com and they are well organized in “colors” categories. Just be sure to browse their template archive in the “free pdf templates” menu at the top right sidebar.

Just few examples of what they offer:

When it comes to free resources is very difficult to find something of high quality, not impossible, but hard to find. FreePSDFiles.net is one of those resources that when found you’ll be visiting over and over again. Why? Because they offer free PSD files that will make you happy. FreePSDFiles.net carries lot of graphics, all of them available for free (no registration required, thank you) and the best of all is that any file is in native PSD Photoshop format.

Categories are, among others, 3D renders, backgrounds, buttons, icons, illustrations, objects, site templates, textures, web elements and many others.

A very clean and friendly web design makes this site a pleasure to browse. Each image includes a short description and vital file info like resolution, file format, file size, item in the set, author and the obvious download button.

Very recommended resource for designers and graphic artists.

Free Christmas Fonts

Check out FontSpace for some impressive fonts perfect for Christmas designs.

Free Vector Christmas Icons

These beautifully done free Christmas icons are exactly what you need to decorate your website or desktop.

Christmas Clip Art

Here you will find many links to Christmas clip art, animation, graphics, wallpapers, and more.

Seamless Christmas Patterns

Find over 100 downloadable Photoshop patterns with a Christmas theme on this amazing site.

FreeVectors.net

Need images that can be used on a variety of projects? Find some cool Christmas themed vector graphics, backgrounds, banners, greeting cards, and more. Make sure to check out all 9 pages to see more vectors than you could ever use for this holiday.

36 Holly Jolly Textures

This collection of 100×100 textures for Photoshop will easily add some holiday fun to your designs.

Free Christmas Animations

Any piece from this stunning collection of animations from Seven Oaks Art would be perfect for adding holiday spirit to a website or email newsletter.

Sparkle Christmas Images

Check out these gorgeous Christmas graphics with extra “bling” on Can Stock Photo. There are sparkling Christmas images and cards, all royalty-free and downloadable for a small fee.

Free Social Networking and RSS Feed Icons

Take advantage of one of these 6 free Christmas icon sets for your RSS feed or social networking account. All are high quality and quite stunning.

35 Beautiful Christmas Icon Sets

Find amazing Christmas icon sets on this site. From social networking icons to file folder icons to graphics perfect for adding to your holiday scene for greeting cards.

Free Transparent PNG or Paint Shop Pro tubes

View this collection of generously donated Christmas images for use with Paint Shop Pro or as transparent PNG files.

23 Photoshop Greeting Card Tutorials

Learn how to create Christmas cards using Photoshop with one of these helpful tutorials. Then use your newly learned skills to design your own custom greeting card for the holidays.

15 Christmas WordPress Themes

This nice list of free Christmas themes for WordPress will really get your blog readers in a festive spirit this year.

45 Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials

Find Christmas tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator in this incredible collection. Whether you need to design wallpaper, greeting cards, illustrations, or backgrounds, you can find it here.

Exclusive Free Photoshop Brushes

This thorough list of brushes includes snowflakes, ornaments, frosted snowflakes, Christmas trees, holiday stars, swirls, and fireworks.

Spice up your Christmas designs with some of items in the resources above. Or simply enjoy some holiday design inspiration to get you in a festive mood. Happy Holidays!

Thankfully, you don’t have to spend a fortune to begin building up a font reserve. In fact, many top-notch font developers are generous enough to share their creations for free. The following are the 9 best resources to get free fonts online to help you begin developing a font arsenal.

1. DaFont

The DaFont website is organized by font category and popularity. One perk of DaFont is you can preview your text in a specific font without downloading it.

2. Font Squirrel

FontSquirrel is a well-organized website with a wonderful selection of fonts allowed for commercial use. The fonts on FontSquirrel are neatly organized, and most are downloadable directly through the FontSquirrel website.

3. 901 Free Fonts

Similar to DaFont, 901 Free Fonts offers a wide range of free fonts if you have time to sift through the various categories. The licensing terms vary between the fonts so check the terms of any you are considering using.

4. Fawnt

The main perk of using Fawnt is you don’t have to sort through thousands of fonts to find one worth downloading. Rather, Fawnt features about 50 high-quality free fonts that are worthwhile for high-quality designers like you.

5. TypeNow

TypeNow is a little more tedious to sift through when searching for free fonts but is a worthwhile outlet that provides some high -quality options. Check out the website’s themed section to download great free fonts based on the typefaces of popular movies, products, and more.

6. FontSpace

FontSpace includes more than 14,000 fonts so you will need some extra time to sort through them all. However, many of the fonts are high quality and are easy to download, which makes this a worthwhile resource.

7. UrbanFonts

The UrbanFonts website includes a wide range of free font options and is fairly straightforward to use. The website’s homepage includes a listing of featured fonts to avoid sorting through the various categories.

8. YourFonts

YourFonts takes a unique spin on the idea of free fonts and allows you to make a typeface out of your handwriting. Even if you don’t intend to use the handwriting font in your designs, it can still be a good time waster.

9. FontStruct

Of course, not everyone has naturally beautiful handwriting that would make a perfect font. If this sounds like your handwriting, then FontStruct is a better option that allows you to digitally construct a typeface.

While there are many free font resources online, these are the top 9 proven best options. Hopefully by using the above resources, you will find a variety of fonts to incorporate into your designs and make them better than ever.

Below listed are Free Website Templates and each of them is designed with a certain holiday in mind. Whether you want to update your website for Halloween, Christmas or St Valentine’s Day, there is a design for you. After all, it’s so exciting to spread the holiday cheer and bring smiles to everyone who visits your website on holidays.

Please remember Free Holiday Website Templates are easy to modify. All you have to do is replace the default content with your own one and your website is ready to go.

We bet all designers, web masters and creative bloggers will love the following freebies and will bookmark this post for future reference.

Free Website Templates for Halloween

Halloween Festival

Halloween

Halloween

Halloween Pumpkins

Free Website Templates for Christmas

Merry Christmas

Christmas Eve

Metamorph Xmas

Metamorph Christmas

Christmas Website Template

Happy Holidays

Gift Blog

Christmas

Free Website Templates for St Valentine’s Day

Valentine Rabbits

Gift

Happy Valentine

Who is RidgePark?

Ridgepark is a real estate company which manages, leases and develops real estate properties worldwide.

Winning Entry, What do you get?

- a feature post of your website, products and services on smashingshare
- lifetime link back in the post
- shared with 2400+ facebook fans and 3300+ twitter followers and mailing list

How do you enter?

- post a comment “enter me”
- share this blog post via facebook and twitter using the share links
- post a link to view your logo entry (either public or via email to info@smashingshare.com)

Have a question about what to design? Just email us! We’ll fill you in!

Entries are being accepted until November 1, 2010.

Free Website Design Company Theme

The blue theme was created for a small design studio / company website , but use it as you wish!

Free Website Marketplace Theme

The grey theme was created to be used for a marketplace website, but use it as you wish!

Free Website Marketing Theme

This theme was created to be used for a marketing company, but use it as you wish!

GNU General Public License

The theme is released under GNU General Public License. You can use it for all your web projects for free, without any restrictions and you may modify the theme as you wish. If you download and enjoy the use of this template, please spread the word with a link to this article. At the bottom of the screen, you can download the PSD Package (.zip, 3.8 Mb ).

Download Agreement

• 1. You can use them on as many domain names as you wish
• 2. You may use them for your clients’ projects / websites. Number of projects is not limited
• 3. You may not claim intellectual and exclusive ownership to any of the templates offered.
• 4. You may not sub-license the original template and their individual files to anyone else.
• 5. You may modify them. However, you may not modify for the purpose of resell.

Download all 3 PSD Free Templates

We’re pleased to offer a free coded template with master photoshop design file. This template was provided by a loyal smashingshare reader. Don’t forget to subscribe for our updates on the right side of your screen.

The free template package includes a homepage, two content pages, portfolio page, styles sheet and master photoshop design file.

The theme is released under GNU General Public License. You can use it for all your web projects for free, without any restrictions and you may modify the theme as you wish. If you download and enjoy the use of this template, please spread the word with a link to this article. At the bottom of the screen, you can download the theme + PSD source (.zip, 1.3 Mb ).

Live Preview of the template

Homepage View

Content Page 1

Content Page 2

Portfolio View

Download Agreement

• 1. You can use them on as many domain names as you wish
• 2. You may use them for your clients’ projects / websites. Number of projects is not limited
• 3. You may not claim intellectual and exclusive ownership to any of the templates offered.
• 4. You may not sub-license the original template and their individual files to anyone else.
• 5. You may modify them. However, you may not modify for the purpose of resell.
• 6. You must keep a SmashingShare linkback in the footer of the template.

Download the complete template with PSD design file.

You can try their service, ITS FREE. Once you are satisfied with the results and how things work, you can upgrade your account.

Below you will find some amazing example of websites created with Wix.

Smashing Share continuously bringing smashing freebies resources for its readers. You can download free business icons from below.

Download Free Business Icons – Part 3

Would you like to see more icons of different categories?

What are your thoughts about all free business icons? Would you be interested to have more different category icons for download? Leave your comments below so I can get back with more icons what Smashing Share readers like. Your comment and feedback is really valuable for me.

Don’t forget to subscribe for smashing updates at Smashing Share.

Download Free Business Icons – Part 2

Would you like to see more free business icons?

What are your thoughts about these free business icons? Would you be interested to have more free business icons for download? Leave your comments below so I can get back with more icons what Smashing Share readers like. Your comment and feedback is really valuable for me.

Don’t forget to subscribe for smashing updates at Smashing Share.

Download Free Business Icons

Would you like to see more business icons?

What are your thoughts about these business icons? Would you be interested to have more free business icons for download? Leave your comments below so I can get back with more icons what Smashing Share readers like. Your comment and feedback is really valuable for me.

Don’t forget to subscribe for smashing updates at SmashingShare

Also it is the perfect place to upload, share and store your favourite videos. We support the most popular file formats. Use the UPloader App for videos up to 2GB and upload them in a snap. Use email to easily share videos with friends and family. Enjoy the full playback and slideshow support by uploading your videos today!

Step 1 – Upload

Upload photos and videos from virtually any device, store up to 2 GB on us, and know that we’ll never, ever shrink your files.
And that’s good thing.

Step 2 – Organize

Say goodbye to lost photos and videos – find them fast with tags. Then sit back and enjoy reliving all the fun with your albums and clips.

Step 3 – Edit

Add creative juice. Season to taste.
Spice up your photo’s looks with a touch up, tint, and trim. Try it yourself

Step 4 – Share

Memories with borders
Share your photos and video clips in galleries. Expand your reach with an easy drag and drop to transfer photos to Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa and other sites.

Visit Photoshop.com – Join – Get Started

[ad#468x60]

Get Useful Tips for Effective Web Design with testking E20-361 tutorial. Our testking 642-983 design guide and testking 1Y0-A06 live demos are perfect for all those who want to learn web designing but have no professional background.