The professionalism of a web designing company is judged not only by the creativity it shows in doing the website but also the way it handles the after sales service. Websites are custom made products and intangible in nature. So the after sales support can be complicated. It is not something you can pre-define as in case of other products you sell. As a result the pricing of this service is also something difficult to forecast.

The complexity of after sales service varies with the nature of the website. If the website is a simple one, the maintenance will be easier. For complex websites the edits will be much difficult and time consuming. The nature of edits from your client can also vary. The content related edits can be simple and easy to achieve. But there can be some major edits pertaining to the core template of the entire site or some major code reworking for the website functionality. These are something which will be time consuming and will need lot of hard work from the design team.

Many web designers offer free after sales service for the first three months or six months. But these generally include minor tweaks and edits. For major rework they charge extra. In case of budget web design service, the maintenance is chargeable right from day one after the site is online. There should be a clear contract between the designer and the client mentioning what is included in the after sales service and the price. Fixing the price is a tricky job. You can either charge on an hourly rate or a monthly rate. For low budget clients you can also charge based on the volume of edits.

No matter how much you charge, ultimately what matters is how well you handle your client’s website after sales service. If you are prompt with your service and charge reasonably for the maintenance work, you are sure to develop a great relationship with your client. It will mean more repeat projects and good word of mouth. What more can you ask for your web design business?

Technorati Tags: web edits, website after sales service, website maintenance

Every business owner wants his website to come at #1 position on major search engines. Off page SEO is one of the popular ways to increase your page ranking in search engine results. Expert web marketers apply off page SEO for their website. Only few of them become successful to bring their site to the first page of search engine results. Most internet marketers fail to do effective off page SEO because they make common off page SEO mistakes.

If you are following off page SEO techniques but still not getting results, then chances are you may be doing one of the following off page SEO mistakes:

1) Spamming

Weblog comment: Suppose you want to put your comment on a sports blog. If you put your web log comment advertising your product on ‘Best dog food’ and make no relevant comment to the blog post, then the webmaster will disapprove your comment.

Forums: Forums are used to share knowledge among a like-minded group of people. When you participate as a forum member, either you should ask a question or you should answer to someone’s doubts. Instead of providing knowledge to someone, if you advertise your product or offer your service directly, then webmaster of the forum will treat your post as SPAM. You will be warned and then eventually banned from that Forum. Also, there are subject specific forums. Decide whether these forums are related to your subject before you join them.

Social bookmarking: Social bookmarking site’s main objective is to make users aware about news on buzzes. If you put your product introduction with a site backlink, the users may take your bookmarks as SPAM. They won’t click on such bookmarking links.

Social networking: Sending business offers to unknown people are restricted in social networking sites. You can send your business message to your friends or people in your network. Internet marketers send their offer to unknown people. When site administrators find out that, they warn the user. Be careful if you are trying to follow such techniques.

Link farming: Link farming is done in pages containing hundreds of outbound links. If you submit your site link there, then search engines will certainly treat your site as SPAM and skip your links in the search results.

2) Wrong keyword selection within Anchor tag: When you are using the backlinking technique, your attention remains in placing the link of your website. But you should also focus on placing the right SEO keyword within anchor tag. If your main keyword is ‘electronic items’ then include that SEO keyword in the site backlink description. It can be like, ‘Website for selling modern electronic items and gadgets’ with a backlink to your website. If there is no keyword within the back linked anchor tag, then off page SEO can help you in no way. If you include a gadget name as SEO keyword that you don’t sell at all, it will become a bad keyword. Always be careful in choosing right keyword in site back link description.

3) Same keyword usage: Marketers like you research a lot in choosing the right keyword which is less competitive and searched more on web. Finally, they select one or two keywords and place them in all the backlinks. When search engine spiders see the same keyword and description being used widely in all the inbound links, they take it like robots are submitting these backlinks. If you follow the same keyword in all backlinks, your site’s search engine ranking will drop.

4) Submitting link in similar sites: Internet marketers first get the list of social networking sites or bookmarking sites. Then they make accounts in all these sites in the list and submit their backlinks one by one. Search engines take your site suspiciously when they see all social networking or bookmarking sites are flooded with your backlinking. Such off page SEO mistakes will decrease your page ranks. Submit five backlinks in five article social networking sites, then five backlinks in article directories and so on. When search engines get your links from various sources, they take it as natural inbound links.

Keep these points in mind to strengthen your Off Page SEO and promote your site better in major search engine rankings.

Technorati Tags: backlink, inbound link, off page SEO, off page SEO mistakes, SEO keyword

Most of your traffic comes to your website from search engines. If your site’s page rank or link popularity is high, it will get a higher ranking in the search results. More visitors click on your website’s link from search results and will visit your site. The SEO technique by which your website’s link popularity can be increased is called Off Page SEO.

Content is the real factor which can drive traffic to your site. But along with it there are popular off page SEO factors that can truly increase your link popularity. Here is an indicative list with off page search engine optimization tips:

Article marketing: Articles are great way to tell your product, service and the subject in which you expertise. Most of the article sites allow you to add your author bio at the end of your article. You can place a link back to your website in that section. Visitors may read about your article. If they feel interested about your business or service, they will click on your backlinks.

Social Networking Sites: Social networking sites are great place to build your network of friends. They are also good promoting your business. You can provide your website’s URL in the profile section or in personal details. You can get ‘fans’, ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ whom you can tell about your business products. When you create on a group with subject on your product and may get like-minded group members.

Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is a growing trend by internet users to bookmark important sites they visit. Digg, Propeller, Mixx, Yahoo! Buzz, Stumble Upon show how to get instant visits by web traffic when you bookmark any exciting web link in these social bookmarking sites. You can place a description of your business site and add a list of tags in your bookmarking. This type of off page SEO strategy requires some precautions. Make sure your URL is unique and never submitted before in a particular bookmarking site. And your news should be exciting, not a spammy news promoting your product directly.

Forum Posting: This is another important off page SEO factor. Forum sites have some general guidelines. If you maintain that, the webmaster of the forum will allow you to add your hyperlinked signature in a signature box. All the forum post and reply to the thread you make, will be followed by your backlinked signature. Hence traffic may come from that link.

Web directories: Web directories list your website on their specific category. There are free and paid web directories. Free directories like DMoz, HotFrog are good sites where you can list your website. This is a nice way to increase the page rank of your site.

Free advertising: There are free advertising sites like Craiglist, where you can place free classified ad on your business. Targeted prospects will visit your site everyday through such off page SEO technique.

Link exchange: There are group of sites on web that place each other’s link on their websites. When you submit your links to a link exchange webmaster, he will give you HTML code of another site and that code you have to keep on your site. Like text links, banners are also exchanged in link exchange mode.

Press Release: Press release is a very important off page SEO factor and often ignored by webmasters. Press release has certain target audience who regularly search for important releases. If you are launching new products or services on your website, write a press release for that job. A professionally written press release can always bring quality traffic to your site.

Web log commenting: There are popular blogs or, web logs which have high page ranks. These blogs are frequently visited by thousands of visitors. Post your comments on these web blogs. Be careful about relevance of your comment with the original blog post. Otherwise, your comment may be treated as spam. While submitting your comments, you can place your website link. That can create effective backlinks for you.

Applying all these off page SEO techniques is a time consuming task. Don’t start all these techniques at one time. Choose any 2-3 techniques and continue them. If you build more than 50 backlinks in one day, search engines may treat you as spammer and your website’s page rank may fall. Your SEO strategy should be to build 10-15 backlinks per day. After 3 or 6 months, you may be amazed by the increase in page ranks. If you have patience, you will find out my off page SEO tips as the best way to deliver traffic to your website.

Technorati Tags: off page SEO, off Page SEO factor, off page SEO technique, search engine optimization tips, SEO strategy

On page SEO is an intelligent way to bring traffic on your website. Almost all webmasters do SEO for their website, but still they don’t get enough site visitors. Why? They make on page SEO mistakes which are very crucial for web page optimization.

If you are interested about doing on page SEO rightly, then follow these tips and avoid on page SEO mistakes:

Choosing wrong title: The title tag is very important. The title should properly reflect the web page content. Most of the time you put wrong keywords in your title. In absence of right keywords, search engine bots won’t be able to identify your page content. If you have 5 to 7 pages in your site, don’t put the same title text for all the pages. Search engines hate duplicate headings and titles.

Meta tags: While using different values like robots, description, keywords under the name attribute of meta tag, you may do mistakes. When using meta name=”robots”, don’t write content=”noindex,nofollow”. Search engine spiders will simply abandon your page. If you have a single Forex business software as product, don’t write “Forex, Forex market, Forex trading, Forex broker, Forex trends, Forex tutorial, Forex quotes, Forex Software” under meta name=”description”. Search engines will simply treat your page as SPAM. Write a meaningful sentence like, “ForexABC.com is a website for selling best Forex market software worldwide through internet”. And in meta name=”keywords”, put different keywords. A series of keywords containing same word will surely be treated as spammy.

Content: You may try SEO copyrighting and include too many keywords all over your page content. The practice is called keyword stuffing. If search engine spiders find out that your page is low in content and high in keyword stuffing, they will skip your pages.

Keyword research: You are strictly followed all on page SEO techniques and your content is really worth, but traffic is still going away. Why? Because you may not have chosen the right keywords. Choosing wrong keyword is a kind of suicide to your SEO. Do some keyword researches about what and how people are searching and include relevant keywords in your text.

Sitemap and indexing: As a webmaster it is your job to keep a sitemap.xml of your website. Check inner links among pages and avoid any broken link.

Text formatting: You may have written a good article with right keywords but that’s not enough for the on page SEO. If you keep your text unformatted then search engine spiders can’t understand the keywords. Important keywords of the page should be highlighted with bold (B) or underlined (U) tag. Search engine takes the words in such tags seriously and shows your page right on the search results. But don’t use too much of bold or italic tags. That’s another mistake to confuse search engines.

These are some of the common on page SEO mistakes that you should avoid. And remember, the primary factor for getting visitors on your website is great content, not any SEO technique. If you do SEO with losing focus on content, that will be another mistake!

Technorati Tags: on page SEO, on page SEO mistake, search engine, webmaster

Lulu’s major business is publishing and printing books. If you are a newbie author, then Lulu gives you free book publishing option and provides you a free Lulu ISBN number. Whether the book is a cook book or, poetry book, novel book, photo book, Lulu fulfills the need of every type of author. They offer their extended service to provide their online tools to design your book cover. If your book is a paperback or hardcover, Lulu has a solution for both. After publishing the book online, Lulu prints the book occasionally only when author or any reader places order for the book. After printing, Lulu ships the book to the delivery address within time limit and under standard charges.

If you are an author having less design sense, then you may face problems to design Lulu book cover. Lulu’s default tools will give you a sample ebook background and some default colors and fonts. You can’t customize it unless you have book cover design knowledge and software.

If you want to print your book through Lulu, then book covers should be designed according to the book size. And the designer must leave space for gutter margin of the book’s front and back cover image. All the images and texts should be within the allowed book cover margin specified by Lulu. Generally, authors who themselves design their book cover, don’t follow this rule and their content on book cover is cut while the book is printed.

The allowed area for putting contents will vary depending on the size of your book page. For example, Lulu has varied book sizes like pocket book, digest, A5, US Trade, Royal, Comic Book, Crown Quarto, Small Square, Large Hardcover, A4, Large Square, US Letter, Landscape. Depending of type book page size, the area for inserting book text, images will be different.

A custom Lulu book cover designer will quickly understand what kind of book cover you want on Lulu.com and will nicely design it. He will take care of the binding margin and insert content within the feasible region. Also a custom book cover designer has lots of stock photographs which he may possibly use on your book cover. If you have written a series of books / ebooks, the designer can design it at a cheaper rate. That is the benefit of designing the Lulu book/ ebook cover with a graphic designer.

You may create a blog or website for the promotion of your books and ebooks in the future. In case, you are selling an ebook through your blog or website, then a designer can make nice, professional 3D looking ebook cover on your blog or website. A good designer can make a unique creative design for you that will stand out from the clutter and draw attention from more visitors. Getting service from an expert Lulu ebook cover designer will be great for your present and future ebook design and promotions.

Technorati Tags: ebook cover design, lulu ebook cover, lulu ecover, lulu ecover design, Lulu.com

Kunaki is your ultimate CD / DVD fulfillment centre. They print the CD / DVD cover design and assemble it on CD / DVD. They publish your content on CD / DVDs depending on orders you place. And what’s more? Kunaki takes care of the entire packaging and shipping of the published materials to proper delivery addresses.

Kunaki has its own CD / DVD publishing software in their site. You can easily create your own CD / DVD cover using this software. You can download it free of cost from their website.

For small businesses and individuals who have requirement for minimum number of CD / DVD publishing, Kunaki is the best choice for them. Kunaki caters to the needs of all types of people and organizations in the area of CD / DVD publishing. This is why they are the market leader today.

Kunaki has some ready made templates. If you urgently need your ecover to be designed, you can check out Kunaki’s default templates. These templates contain blank spaces to fill up with your title and content.

In case you want to add uniqueness to your product and create a branding for it you can custom design Kunaki templates. There are professional designers in the market who can add the content on CD / DVD with nice fonts and graphics that go with your theme. An expert Kunaki designer can even design the CD / DVD cover at an affordable price. If a good designer makes a custom Kunaki template, then it will be creative and unique. Custom Kunaki template won’t get lost in the crowd of common Kunaki templates designed by Kunaki’s software. You will stand ahead of your competitors to showcase your CD / DVD cover.

Once you design your own ecover by the help of an expert Kunaki CD / DVD cover designer, submit it to Kunaki and get your sales increased by multiple times.

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Technorati Tags: CD / DVD cover, ecover designer, Kunaki, Kunaki ecover, Kunaki template

You may have written a great ebook with loads of valuable information. The next big process starts when you plan to market your book. You need to follow to sell your book better. For that you need to concentrate on the packaging of your ebook. You need make your visitors understand about the ‘physical evidence’ or visualization of your ebook. To do this, you need an ebook cover.

Visitors on your site want to get a quick idea about your ebook, before they read the content of your ebook. One ebook cover image can tell visitors what your book is all about. Your book may be a thriller/ humour/ play/ collection of essays/ novel/ poetry etc. A suitable image on the ebook cover gives information about the subject. Ecover graphics really play a crucial role to make book loving people to feel interested about your book.

Here are some reasons why you should have your own book cover:

Tangible image: You know digitized versions of books are read through computers, laptops and ebook reading devices. A customer can’t hold the book in hand and scroll through the pages. So what matters is to make him feel that the ebook really exists. An ebook cover image makes the customer feel that the ebook ‘physically exists’. This image boosts up customer’s confidence who may soon decide to buy your book.

Initial attraction: Most ebook covers are designed with 3D look and nice colors and images are added on ebook cover to attract the customers. Customers like stunning and modern looking graphics on covers and interests grow in them naturally.

Information: Ecovers generally contain author’s name, book title, publisher’s information and few short, relevant information. If your ebook is popular, your readers may be searching your book on several websites. Once they see the ecover image with book title or your name they will stop for a moment at that page and look for further information regarding your book.

Brand image: Through your ebook your name and book title can be branded to your customers. A cool ecover helps to create a brand image of you and your books. Similar styles of fonts and cover designing help your readers to identify a series of ebooks written by you. The use of logo in book cover helps to spread publishing company’s brand. An eye catchy professional ebook cover also proves how organized and serious you are in marketing your products.

You don’t want to create an ebook that will gather digital dust. Get a professional ecover designed for it and find more buyers for your ebook.

Technorati Tags: ebook, ebook cover, ebook cover design

Applying On Page SEO is an effective technique to increase your search engine rankings. You need to learn the On Page SEO helps your web pages to increase page rank in search engine results.

On page SEO helps you to promote your site and this technique is popular because it helps you to get higher SERP (Search Engine Rank Position). This SEO consists of following techniques:

• Your keyword density should be moderate in the overall web pages. Don’t do keyword stuffing.

• Application of Bold / Strong, Italic / Emphasize and Underline: Search engine spiders look for words on a web page which are bold, italic or underlined. If you put important words within these tags, then search engines take them as important keywords and their search will be optimized on those keywords. These are plain syntax you can follow:

<b> On Page SEO </b>

<strong> On Page SEO </strong>

<i> On Page SEO </i>

<em> On Page SEO </em>

<u> On Page SEO </u>

• Text size: You can set important headings of the paragraphs bigger than the original text. Heading tag (H tag) is appropriate to do that. In on page SEO, the texts within heading tag are easily tracked by the search engines.

<h1> On Page SEO </h1>

• Title: The title tag is an important On Page SEO element, often ignored by different webmasters. The content within <title> must be unique. If you have five web pages, then the title in each page should be unique. Otherwise, search engines will treat them as duplicate content and may skip your important pages having duplicate title tag texts. Don’t fill up the title content with so many keywords. That way your web page may again be ignored by search engines.

<title> …. </title>

• Meta Description: Your description is important for search engine spiders. You should avoid too small and too long descriptions. Length of description should not exceed 160 characters. Just like title description, Meta description should be unique and should not be excessive with keywords.

<meta name=”description” content=”……”>

• Meta Keywords: Search engine spiders hugely rely on Meta keywords. You can put 10-15 keywords separated by comma (,). The keywords you choose should be relevant to the content of your page. In website optimization, pages should not be very focused on all the keywords. Only one or two keywords should be properly highlighted throughout the page content.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”……”>

• Image tagging: Use <alt> to tag images with keywords. When searched with proper keywords, search engines find the proper images. If image file is given proper name, that gives search engines to find right kind of images in their results.

• Internal Link Structuring: Pages of the website should be internally linked. If the site’s internal navigation is well structured, then search engines will find each website page quite easily.

• URL name: The name of the URL or domain name is also important in On Page SEO. Too long URL names stuffed with keywords are rejected by search engines. And the URL name should not contain much numbers. The web page name should describe the subject in short. If you have contents on direct response graphics and minisites on a single we page, then name the page as minisite-graphics.html. Don’t use names like page2.html. Neither search engine spiders can identify such pages nor you can easily track your page contents quickly if you use page names like that.

• Sitemap: Include a sitemap for your website. Without having a sitemap makes your web pages difficult to find through searching. A sitemap will keep your web pages indexed and search engine bots will find them easily. Even for visitors a sitemap helps them to easily navigate.

For a good website optimization, make your page coding bug free. Erroneous pages are skipped by search engines. You need to validate your page coding. Check your pages with W3C validator. Once your page is validated as per international standard and you apply all the On page SEO techniques, your page will have a better page rank in all major search engine results.

Technorati Tags: keyword stuffing, on page SEO, page rank, search engine spider, SEO, tag

If you are having problem for designing a good banner, it is better to call an expert. An expert banner designer can charge you a handsome amount for designing a set of banners. Will that investment be worth for your business?

When you place your banner ads on other websites, you want to make sure that your banner is good enough to advertise your business. For targeted traffic rushing towards your website, your banner design should grab viewer’s eyes and visitors will be interested to view the banner ad properly.

You need a banner designer to create a banner that will ‘sell’. A good banner designer can give you the following benefits:

• Creative design: A banner designer can apply his original work and creativity in the designs. The graphics and text should convince the consumer to click on the banner ads. An expert banner ad designer will make a design that will be uncommon and unique. This design will be certainly better than the free banner templates available on the web.

• Custom size: A designer can design your banners in custom and standard sizes. He can suggest you what banner sizes are appropriate for the available space for your banner.

• Banner format supported: Output of banner graphics can be delivered in JPG, GIF and SWF formats. A banner designer can deliver you output in any of these formats or in all formats.

• Animation or still banner: According to your requirement, your banner designer can make banner in still graphics or in animation. Animated banners will draw much attention and can put more content within it. Also, your animated banner designer will deliver the animated banner in your preferred GIF or SWF format. Expert designer can also design low cost static banners which can be quite innovative in design.

• File size: Banner sizes should be optimized and should be faster loading on web pages. In popular publisher’s sites, the byte size is the main cause of concern. A good designer will keep the banner size minimum such that it is accepted in major publisher’s site.

• Cost: When you are investing thousands of dollars for your business, you have to spend the money on right track. Otherwise, you may lose a big part of it. Compared to big online ad campaigns, expenditure on banner ads come with negligible investment and the results of good banner ad campaign is quite measurable and assured. An expert banner designer can design a complete banner package at a reasonable price that’s negligible compared to the advertising expenses.

With these benefits, your banner packages will get designed in the hands of an expert designer. A top notch banner designer can design a wonderful banner that will generate enough clicks to reap you profits.

Technorati Tags: animated banner, banner ad, banner designer, banner format, banner size, banner web design, cool banner design, cost of banner, expert banner designer, good banner designer

Every marketer wants to spread his advertising network. Advertisers see it as a golden opportunity if his advertising network grows with little or no expenditure.

In case of banner advertising, advertiser spends in two ways. First he spends money for designing banner and then his expenditure goes more when he advertises his banner on other’s sites.

A free banner exchange programme is set up among advertisers to exchange each other’s banners. The advantage is you don’t need to spend money for this. All you need is to have a free space on your own web pages.

Mainly there are some standard sizes for free banner exchange programmes. Before you exchange your banner with other advertiser’s website, you need to know what banner spaces he is offering you. Do any of the banner spaces fit to your banner size? Get the information from the advertiser what are his banner sizes.

There are few limitations in free banner exchange programmes. The problems that you may face with free banner exchange are:

• There are not too many websites on web that will accept your free banner exchange proposal. As a result you have to link banners with limited number of websites.

• For every banner ad traffic exchange you have to place one banner in your website. If you tie up with ten advertisers, you have to place ten banners of them on your own website. That will occupy lot of webpage spaces on your own website.

• Lack of knowledge about the other advertiser’s site may give your banner little exposure. If the advertiser puts your banner in a spam site, hate site and any other site where visitors are not your target audience, you may not get right kind traffic from free banner exchange programme.

Despite the odds in banner exchange advertising network, there are many advertisers who adopt it in their business. Those businessmen who have a really less budget, they can rely on free banner exchange programmes.

There are websites on internet where you have to make an account for promoting your banner ad for free on web. Since you are not investing any money there is absolutely no problem to take risk in free banner exchange programme.

Technorati Tags: banner ad traffic exchange, banner exchange program, banner exchange programme, free banner advertising network, free banner exchange programme