Graphics and web design blog

Whilst social media might be a relatively new phenomenon, it’s here to stay.

Nowadays, individuals as well as businesses are tweeting, blogging, and facebook-ing like there’s no tomorrow.

Some may have mastered social media, and it now has a defined place in their business – with others following their example. For the rest, it’s something new with unproven results.

Social media can be a greatly effective technique, and participation should be encouraged. However, on a professional level, you do need to have the necessary skills and experience behind you.

Here are a few hints to make your trip into the world of social media a little easier. To make it simple, here are the things you should avoid!

To start with, it’s key that social media is planned. Starting off with a vague “why not” approach is not going to work. It’s important to remember you are the voice for your organisation and you have a reputation to uphold and manage.

Social media is in fact a combination of sales, customer service, PR and marketing – so knowledge of these areas is obviously an advantage.

Secondly, both time and commitment are necessary with social media. You can’t just “have a go”, and give up when you feel like it. People will notice!

There is no hurry so take your time, and start slow. Think about your other commitments, in relation to your overall workload over a specific amount of time.

Choose the platforms that allow you to converse with your target market. Your business doesn’t need to have a presence on every single platform out there.

Don’t set your sights too high, or lose sight of your end goal – keep a sense of direction.

Finally, be careful of what you say! After just one click, thoughts and views representing the whole company are out there on the WWW. Think before you publish!

In addition, be sure to evaluate which techniques are working for your business.

Social media offers you the chance not only to reach potential clients, but also connect with existing ones in a new way. Although, don’t expect instant result. It’s important to understand the limitations, and time is a big factor.

However, social media has certainly got a huge potential to be another effective arm in your communications strategy.

Find out more about what the power of social media could do for your business. Visit Art Division to find out more about us, and the online marketing packages we offer.

I thought I would go with something that may seem quite controversial to a number of you, with this being the first entry for my new site . I am talking with business owners who are very frustrated with Pay per click advertising every day. Concerned at the cost, unsure of the result it delivers and having no idea as to what to do next with their online presence.

In my opinion the answer is easy but let me cover a few points first:

The results from our Pay per Click marketing has been declining for some time however the cost to run our campaigns has almost doubled. So over the course of the last few weeks I have been doing a great deal of research into Pay per Click advertising and whether we should continue using it in a number of our businesses. What is the best method to deliver us the best return for our investment.

While researching Pay per Click we have been actively focusing on SEO, using our own online marketing techniques to drive and improve the positioning of our own websites. The results have been quite exciting in that we have see our sites improve their front page positions by over 3 spots. Now this may not seem much but when you review the impact this has on website activity and click throughs you will be surprised.

First position in the main search engines for your most searched keyword or keyword phrases will generally capture around 50% of the people searching.

* Position 1, approx 50% * Position 2, is less somewhere between 12% and 19%, * Position 3, between 11% and 18%, * Position 4, between 7% and 15% * Position 5-9, between 2% and 4% * Position 10, approx 3%

So let’s compare that with the clicks or traffic that Pay per Click advertisements attract:

* Sponsored ads at the top of the search page attract between 2% and 4% of Clicks * Sponsored ads on the right hand side of the search page attract between 1% and 2% of Clicks

Lets review the numbers. A number one ranked website will attract over 25 times the amount of traffic or viewings or clicks that a Pay per Click advertisement will. So if you are spending $1000 a month on Pay per Click and that generates 100 click throughs to your site, a website that ranks number 1 will get over 2500 clicks. It’s very clear where you should be investing your money – Organic SEO!

Some of you reading this may disagree and that is fine. However if your someone who is spending significant amounts of money on PPC and some of you are then it may be a good time to re-evaluate. Look at investing some of your funds into Optimising your website more effectively.

Organic Search Engine Optimisation outperforms Pay per Click advertising by 2500%. Want better results, take advantage of Heatley Gilmore’s FREE Website Evaluation and SEO Report . Just enter your details to see how you can be improving your Internet Marketing instantly.

When you want to have a business presence in your community you will need to have a plan. Good branding and design for website and printed marketing materials go hand in hand when it comes to developing a plan that will be effective so this can happen. How to develop a plan is what some people struggle with.

Using the strategy to plan out what you want to do in combining the two successfully will be the key. Choosing a great designer that knows how to accomplish this is the best start that knows how to blend them both together. Use the models that have been successful to others and learn from them.

The colors you choose in your branding will define who you are. Take consideration when you decide on the color of your design as it will define who you are. A successful model of this is Target. When you see their logo you know it is them. You do not have to even see their name and you just know.

You can do the same thing they did with thought and consideration. Many times people in business think that they have to rush and get their website up and be there. When you are ready to go live then make a statement and back it up with your printed marketing.

You can have have a great logo design when you put thought into it. Then use that branding in every piece of marketing that you do. With this goal you are branding everything about you. Ensure you want the design and it represents you the way you see yourself not only now but in the future.

There are steps after this to effectively combined all your marketing materials to your website. But start with these basics. Once you do, you will find that the rest of your plan will fall into place more easily.

Ketchup Marketing are a full service web marketing company who provide print design, online marketing and Web Design in Nottingham and Grantham.

If your aim is to get more traffic to your website, it’s undeniable that content is king. At the base of all quality SEO techniques is great quality content. After all, when you’ve attracted all your eager visitors, you need them to keep reading!

Article Marketing is an extremely cost-effective method – and delivers not just an increased quantity of traffic, but more highly targeted traffic, an increased visibility in the search engines (helping your site on its way to the top of Google), and above all, more enquiries about your products and services.

Starting off with a high-quality article (normally around 500 -1000 words), you can use a web agency to do all the work for you. Both in-house copywriters, and a specialist licensed software tool will be used in order to distribute and promote unique versions of your article all around the web.

In using both the latest software and human copywriters, your articles will be targeted at readers who already have an interest in your products or services. It’s then down to the software tool to do all the hard work- distributing the (unique) articles to many hundreds (if not thousands) of article publishers and ezine sites all over the web.

To get the most out of article marketing, it requires commitment! At least 1 article per month for optimum results. The best articles are those that offer something to the reader- perhaps advice on an activity or task (a sports clothing shop might give advice on stretching after running), a how-to article (a mobile phone shop might give a guide on toping-up your mobile abroad), or anything else really, that adds value, and that will attract visitors to read and learn (often without really noticing!) about your company, and the product you’re offering.

By providing this content, your firm will become established as the expert in your niche- potential clients will read your useful, interesting articles, follow your advice, and, after time, start to trust you as the authority in this particular topic. Because they’ll have also seen your name associated with the topic all over the web, you can also expect increased traffic.

But this isn’t the end of the benefits- the content of the articles can easily be adapted into newsletters, e-mails or tweets on Facebook or Twitter.

In addition, every time one of your articles gets published, your site will benefit from a backlink (which will directly improve your SEO). Next to each of your published articles will be your details- about you, your company and your products or services.

It’s simple. Low-cost, minimal effort and excellent, proven results. Can your business really afford to ignore the powerful SEO technique that is Article Marketing?

Looking to find out more about article marketing? Visit www.artdivision.co.uk to learn about the bespoke SEO services we offer.

Finding a search engine optimisation expert may be one of the greatest blessings you will look back on regarding any kind of personal success online. There is so much more to successful Internet Marketing than simply taking a simplistic approach of ‘build it and they will come’ mentality. Finding what people are looking for and providing useful, relevant content is what separates those that consistently make money and those that remain writing for only friends and family.

It is that important, and will make that great a difference. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an ever-changing beast. With one tweak in any of the search engine algorithms, much of the work done over a period of months can become virtually worthless to you. Woe to those that are employing what is commonly known as “Black Hat” techniques. Their efforts will sooner or later cause more grief than any advantage that may be attained.

That may be the single greatest benefit of finding an expert experienced with search engine operations and who keeps up with the industry. Staying ahead of the curve, and following sound tactics, will always pay off in the long run. It will also help you prevent being hurt in your traffic generation when adjustments are made.

Here is where a SEO expert could make all the difference for you. There are so many factors you need to know for setting up a SEO-friendly site. Learning about keywords for example. You need to know what they are, how to find them, how best to use them, and where to use them. Learning about keywords is just one of the most obvious techniques that can make a huge difference.

After you have mastered at least the basics involved with finding and using effective keywords, you will then need to move on to what is technically described as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This is basically using semantically related words in the body of your postings and web content to further enhance the relevant value of your website in the eyes of the search engines. This will include using long-tail keywords in your marketing as well.

The whole idea of optimizing everything is designed for getting the best search placement for terms that people type into the search box. It is a fact that most people will not go much beyond the first couple of pages presented to find what they are looking for. With the sophistication of the search team engineers and the programing involved, not much more will be required in most cases.

The engineers involved in developing the algorithms and other factors that make up these incredible tools, that put so much information at our fingertips, are constantly updating and refining the system to make their product the best possible. Not taking into account the intent of a search engine company can be very costly to you.

The search engine optimisation expert is one that has invested heavily in their career and will provide results. The benefit of working with one assures you will start out on the right foot and build on that foundation for a long-term successful plan. SEO mistakes may be very costly. Getting it right from the start may prove invaluable.

Using a search engine optimisation expert will improve the performance of your online marketing efforts. SEO packages help to identify and improve traffic flow.

Way back when people began showing up online the internet was still in its early stages. Getting your site listed well, at first, was a piece of cake, but as more and more sites came around it become more and more difficult to be in the #1 position. Back then there was a lot of experimenting to do in order to get any site listed at all. Optimization was an unknown and no one knew what made the engines tick, or how their algorithms worked. I remember trying things without really having any idea if it would work or not, or if it would really make any difference at all. Over the years there was a lot of experimentation done and the rewards of all this is that today we know what works and what doesn’t and we know exactly what type of changes need to happen to a website in order for it to rise in the listings.

Back when I started doing this optimization thing the term SEO, or optimization for that matter, wasn’t even known. At that point in time the engines utilized the meta tags to rank a site. The site that had the most repetitions of a keyword turned out to be the one who ranked #1 for it. It was crazy times. Google wasn’t even online yet. All you had to do to be the #1 listing was add keywords to your meta tags. It was an incredible easy time to make some money online.

After a while the engines started to become a little more sophisticated. The title tag was perhaps one of the first things that turned up as something you could do to help your sites’ listings beyond the meta tags. The engines had now realized that they needed to find other ways to figure out which site was the best out of what was there. The meta tags were simply abused to the max. These were very exciting times. The internet was growing in leaps and bounds and websites were cropping up by the thousands. Never has there been a more exciting time of life in recent history.

As time ticked away those who were involved in an online business realized that without having a top listing on the engines they were not going to get much traffic. Getting into the #1 position became mandatory to be successful. We as SEO people really didn’t have any proven methodology to get the job done. It was all a lot of trial and error. Good judgment of course was always on the table, but who knew what the algorithms really were? No one did! Our experimentation paid if in finding both things we had to do in order to get good listings, as well as many things we discovered we did not want to do at all.

Over the past years all of that work that used to be kept secret, or was very complicated and experimental, is now all common knowledge. Along with this new status of SEO as being common knowledge comes the ability to learn how to SEO yourself. You can take a SEO training course, or you can go online and learn it from the many sites that have blogs and forums. Today all of that trial and error, and experimentation of yesteryear, is all set standards and regular procedures.

There are quite a few ways for you to learn SEO today through online tutorials and courses. Be sure to choose a SEO tutorial that will show you the coding changes to make as well as provide information about inbound linking and how to begin generating these valuable backlinks to your site. Today, it’s all a matter of learning what SEO is and then getting the job done … it’s no longer a specialty field that you need to hire a technical guru for. SEO has settled down and become a standard part of web development.

Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service and offers Ethical SEO Training as an affordable introduction to SEO (enough to optimize any website), as well as an Advanced SEO Training Course.

There is nothing more central to any human being than the desire to be entertained. People want to get excited, be tantalized. People want information and to learn and discover and be captivated. The bottom line is that you need to provide something of interest to your readers or they will find that interest elsewhere. This applies to online business as well and in particular any type of content writing including article marketing and on-site content.

If you want people to go ahead and read what you are writing, then you need to capture their attention right away. The title is the first place, and quite possibly the only chance you will get, to accomplish this. This is where you want to choose your words wisely and utilize not only your keywords but words of action as well. Words that will make your reader want to continue.

When anyone does a search on any major search engine they are provided with a listing of websites. Many of these listings show the title tag, or part of it anyway. If you can captivate a person right here and right now, chances are good they will click on your site, even if you are not in the #1 position.

Any title needs to be thought of in this way, not only the title tag on a web page. No matter what you are writing you need to get your readers attention. You want them to continue to read, or even to start to read, whatever it is you have put down into the written word. In article marketing this will be the title of your article. In content on a page it will be the headings and sub-headings of the content. Use the heading tags here, H1 and H2.

On a basic web page it is difficult to get your readers attention with your keywords alone. Here is where you need to get a little more going for yourself to make it more appealing. Some words are deemed by the experts are more important, or more influential to readers than others. The words you, results, health, guarantee, discover, love, proven, safety, save and new. Some say that you, free, new and how are the most important words to use within titles or descriptions.

Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service where SEO Training is offered both through an Ethical SEO Training Course and an Advanced SEO Training Course. Robert can also SEO your site for you with a typical monthly SEO Campaign. Check here for free reprint licence: {title}.

For those who are in the dark about website design, it is actually graphic design, which is applied to create a website.

The worldwide web has taken the world by storm. So far, a billion people worldwide have checked it out. Hence, various online companies have mushroomed to promote their businesses. More and more firms are creating their businesses through the internet to get customers as each day passes by.

It is common for people to shop, bank, socialize and date online these days. In relation to this, many companies are targeting the much wider and larger audience in the world of internet. To attract customers and have a successful business, a company website is important.

Apart from concentrating on the aesthetic features of site, a web designer also ensures that there are proper functions as well. Online visitors would be keen to browse through a site if it is attractive enough. Therefore, web design plays an important part in the success of an online enterprise.

Normally, electronic documents and other important applications are stored in a web server for easy access by a site visitor. Web design also involves the creation of web pages with interactive features and pertinent content. Web content may have text or bit-mapped images such as JPEG.

Appearance and visibility are features, which are important for a site. An attractive site may have creative text and graphics, which are eye-catching. User-friendly feature is necessary for easy maneuvering around the site. A person should be able to find the website in any of the key search engines with ease.

In short, web design involves features such as appearance, visibility, usability and content. Nevertheless, its focus would be on the graphic design of a site.

Ketchup Marketing are a full service web marketing company who provide print design, online marketing and Web Design in Lincoln and Grantham.

As a business owner, there are many different advertising strategies you can utilize in order to improve the popularity of your business. There are also a variety of actions you can take in the online world in order to spread the word about services your business offers. One of the best tools you can take advantage of when you wish to spread information about your business to the world is definitely a website. In order to make sure that your website is properly designed and formatted, you may want to consider the possibility of taking advantage of Atlanta website design services.

There are a number of reasons why any business that is creating a website should hire a web design company. Web design companies can create excellent graphics for a website, but they can also take advantage of unique tools that can improve the advertising exposure that a company generates in the online world as well.

In order to properly construct a website for your business, a company that design websites will first create a layout for your site. The layout of the website should be will well thought out in order to ensure customers can easily find the information and services they are looking for when they visit your website.

Once the layout of a site is established, it is likely that your website design company will proceed to optimize the content of the website in order to attract a large amount of customers to the site through search engines.

The appearance of a website is often one of the most important aspects of website design strategies. In order to ensure that the website design strategies that are used for your site are as effective as they can possibly be, it is also a good idea to properly format your site and create relevant content for Internet viewers to read as well. When you combine superb graphics along with excellent content, a website can portray a very high level of quality to customers.

A design company can make all of these tasks much easier to deal with as a business owner too. An Atlanta website design company will also have the skills and tools that are necessary to create a well-designed website. In most cases, website design companies will also have the knowledge and experience that is necessary to properly format a website’s content. As long as you hire a web design company that can not only create a beautiful website, but can also optimize the content of the website for search engines, you can be certain that you will not only be impressing every visitor that comes to your business website, but you will also be increasing the amount customers that visit your website on a daily basis as well.

Finding an experienced Atlanta Web site design company can easily improve your company traffic and sales rates. Atlanta website design ensures smart marketing tactics and methods for your organization.

The goal of any web designer is to make sure the end user has a good experience with a website. When people have difficulty navigating a site, viewing its contents, or even getting it to load in their web browser, they are much more likely to leave the site and never come back. Therefore to make sure your website is usable and welcoming, use these best practices on web design and development.

For optimal usability, your website should operate the same in all internet browsers. With so many on the market, achieving this ideal can be a challenge. The best way to handle this is to view your design in each of the major browsers. If things look off or don’t work correctly, then make the necessary adjustments to achieve consistency.

Search engines index pages of a website. So, more often than not, your visitors will arrive at your website through a page with the information they are looking for on it rather than the front door. For this reason, and others, you should always have a menu with links to other sections of your website and the homepage.

Many people today are struggling with myopia, age related or otherwise. For you this means using fonts that don’t strain the eyes and avoiding using font sizes smaller than 12 pixels. You also want to make your fonts elastic by defining them in percentages rather than pixels or points. Savvy visitors will use the zoom function on their browsers and percentages make it easier for fonts to scale.

A good habit to get into is to use the “Alt” tag on images and the “Title” tag on links. Browsers created for the visually impaired as well as search engine read those labels to understand what the link or image contains. In addition to making your site readable to the blind, you’ll also make your site more search engine friendly.

It is perfectly okay to try and generate income with ad placement, like Google Adsense, on your site. Plastering ads in every open space on your site is not a good idea. You will cause your site to become difficult to navigate and hard to look at. Additionally, people will think you are a spammer and you’ll find it difficult to hold on to visitors.

There are a lot more best practices on web design and development than what is in this articles. However, employing these few tips will get you going in the right direction. If you endeavor to always but your visitor’s needs first, you will always create a site worth visiting.

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