As web design companies get more and more aggressive with their marketing strategies we see a repetitive cycle of methods. Listed here is some of the many ways of gaining more business and exposure for your web design company. Please feel free to add your own methods or success/failure stories in the comments.

1. Billboards – These are a great way to saturate a large area and grab a lot of attention in a short amount of time. Though, you are limited to marketing your company locally.

2. Radio – Radio jingles or ads is way to attract more of a targeted audience. Radio stations can provide you with a report of demographics for their audience. This can be used to target your ads to listeners in different groups.

3. Seo – Blast your city by optimizing for “(yourcityname) web design” or optimize for “web design company,” “web designer,” “web design.”

4. Door to door – This has been coming up a lot lately. Many of our clients with store fronts have repeatedly been approached by salesman in their store attempting to sell them a web site.

5. Cold calling – Picking up the phone book and dialing away. Get those scripts ready.

6. Google Ad-Words – Paid for search results on Google. “XXXXXX web design” fill in the industry specific blank for key words. Warning: Can get expensive.

7. Direct Mail – Pick an area, city, industry, income group, demographic and send those mailers.

8. Print Ads – 2 x 3 to full page go for a business magazine or small business resource magazine.

9. Social Media – Oh so much you can do with this. Do even know where to start.

10. Do Great Work – Otherwise known as referrals or word of mouth and let your work speak for it self.

Last month, Google announced that they were significantly improving their flash spidering.  This would seem to be good news for our clients whose sites depend on animation.  Indeed, initial research showed that embedded flash files were being indexed.

Our preferred method, inserting via SWFObject, was not.  SWFObject is already a means of providing optimized content to search engines and text-only (mobile) browsers. We use this method because flash banners are often in place of page headings and navigation, some of the most important elements for users and search engines.  SWFObject allowed us to present the same content in static form to search engines, so that there wouldn’t be a disconnect between how a person used the site, and how a search engine saw the site.

Google quickly fixed this, though, due to feedback from their users.  Now google is indexing either the SWF file, or the alternate content.  presumably the alternate content is preferred, but more research is needed to be sure.

Fundamentally, though, it will still be better to serve alternate content. Navigation elements and Logos are often heavily modified to make them pop visually, which requires breaking the text into curves.   If they’re not text, it’s safe to assume that Google can’t see them.  Regardless of search engines, it’s important to have your content available to the growing numbers of mobile(*cough*iPhone*cough*) users, most of whom don’t have flash.