Definition
A graphic designer is someone skilled and trained in art and computer design applications to create visual media that appropriately and compellingly conveys a specific message. Graphic designers follow a ‘brief’, which is an agreed outline of the clients’ needs and objectives. Their design works generally include but not limited to promotional materials like posters, flyers, company logos, stationery, websites, films/TV shows, magazines, books, product packaging, etc.

Types
There are two types of graphic designers: In-house working as part of a team in large and small agencies, and freelance working on their own. However, whether working freelance or in an agency, graphic designers often have to be proactive in presenting or ‘pitching’ their creative concepts and designs to potential clients. Also, projects are usually won through good reputation, word-of-mouth and an impressive portfolio.

Importance
Graphic designers are very crucial in print/publishing and online media, and are involved in a range of industries. Businesses that have websites require design services for banners, newsletters and advertisements. Publishing companies employ graphic artists for page layout designs. Advertising agencies hire them to turn their concepts into visual representation for print, TV or online.

Skills
Graphic design is a very competitive industry. As such, graphic designers should be exceptionally creative and should constantly strive for originality. While many go to college to study the fundamentals of the job, several years of experience in the field is also a suitable option to a formal education. Since they often execute a number of projects simultaneously, precise time management is essential to be able to meet tight deadlines. Last but not the least, graphic designers should consistently updated with the latest industry and technology developments to stay ahead of the competition.

Knowledge:

A great graphic designer will have an established knowledge of their field, and should know what works and what doesn’t work when designing a successful website. They should be able to take your rough sketch and turn it into a professional finished product that is visually attractive and fully functional.

Knowledge comes not only with experience, but with keeping up with the latest internet trends and design tools. A great website in 2006 isn’t going to have the same effect in 2011. A graphic designer with sharp skills in the latest design software, as well as the latest online and social networking tools will turn your idea into a modern, state-of-the-art finished product.

Creativity:

A great graphic designer has the vision and creativity to take even the weakest and most obscure ideas and turn them into powerful and bold realities. They will work with their clients on as many revisions as it takes to create a satisfying final product, even if it’s nothing like the original idea. Essentially, the most creative and innovative graphic designers are the ones who know what the client wants even more than the clients do themselves.

Time:

Because time is money, it is critical to select a graphic designer who can quickly turn around the design for your new website. That is not to say you should accept a poor design if it can be done in less than 24 hours, just remember you get what you pay for. Sometimes the right design arrives after a process of revisions, in which case it is critical that the designer communicates just how long each revision will take. Even if the design takes longer than you originally anticipated, it is worth the investment if the designer delivers a fantastic final product within the quoted time frame.

If your designer doesn’t respond to emails and returns projects days later than originally quoted, you should seek another designer.

Testimonials:

Nothing predicts future work like proven results. Look through the designer’s website for previous client testimonials, which will provide a true and accurate picture of the service the designer provides. Good communication, fast turnaround and outstanding production are all characteristics of an elite designer. Be wary of designers who cannot provide any testimonials – it is likely their previous clients were not satisfied with the work.

SEO consists of two important elements that benefit from each other: On Page Optimisation or On Site Optimisation and Off Page Optimisation or Off Site Optimisation. One element is as crucial as the other. In fact, these two parts should be both implemented to achieve maximum results of your SEO goals. While they complement each other, On Page Optimisation must always be performed first and not the other way around.

On Page Optimisation is the process of optimising your entire website so users can easily find it in various search engines. Relevant keywords/phrases must be included in the web page URL, title tags, Meta tags and descriptions, headlines, sub headlines, ALT tags and body text. You must be careful, though, not to overdo your On Page Optimisation methods, as you risk being marked as a spammy website. On Page Optimisation also deals with the overall site structure and navigation to make the website user-friendly, enhancing user experience. As mentioned above, On Page Optimisation is just half of the SEO process and does not guarantee a good ranking unless Off Page Optimisation is also executed.

Off Page Optimisation, on the other hand, is basically performing SEO techniques outside the website being optimised. It’s all about generating buzz and increasing the website’s credibility and popularity. This usually involves link building activities, like social bookmarking, blogging, forum posting, submitting article directories and many others. The more authoritative the back links obtained, the higher the rankings.

Again, both On and Off Page Optimisation have to take place at tandem to maximize the impact of your SEO efforts. SEO is an ongoing process, so once you get high rankings, your website needs to continuously offer relevant and useful information to search engines to secure your position.

To help you out, here are 7 steps to boost your website conversions:

1. Determine conversion objectives – Start by knowing what you want to achieve. What is your online marketing goal? Some intend to earn revenue, while others just want to generate leads. Regardless of your purpose, having specific objectives is required to succeed in website conversion.

2. Systematize and optimize site structure – Ensure that your website is neat, orderly, and easy to navigate. Remember that you barely have second seconds to grab a visitor’s attention and stir his/her interest in buying your products/services. Unfortunately, if your website is messy or difficult to navigate, your potential customers will not waste time getting confused on your site.

3. Come up with a consistent message – Ensure that your website has a clear, compelling message, and implement it throughout your site. When discussing about your products/services, keep your content and style consistent and relevant. Having a consistent message can help your website achieve a more cohesive look and feel that visitors can easily recognize and remember.

4. Strategically put effective calls to action – Providing accurate steps or directions to visitors is crucial. Never assume that your potential customers already know what to do next. To lead them where you want them, be more direct and specific when labeling buttons or links to click. Instead of using “click here,” clarify your directions further and change it to “click here to buy now.”

5. Ensure fast loading time – Almost everyone wants everything to be fast and instant—including web page loading time. And most people are rather impatient to slow loading websites or simply have no luxury of time to wait. In fact, studies show that around 50% of all visitors will leave a site/web page if not fully loaded in eight seconds.

6. Evaluate shopping experience – Carefully assess the ease of buying products/services on your site. Is it painless and hassle-free to order or do your customers need to go through numerous registration pages just to complete a purchase? Opt for one click ordering process or at least simplify your registration procedure.

7. Test, calculate, improve – Boosting online conversions is an ongoing effort. Ensure that you utilize the correct analytics to constantly gauge and enhance your conversion rates. Check out Google Analytics and Google Conversion Tracking if you don’t have a conversion monitoring package yet.
Though sometimes overlooked, website conversion is indeed one of the most critical elements of Internet marketing. Closely monitor your website conversion rate; otherwise, much of your online marketing efforts would be wasted.

To help boost your marketing efforts, here are the top ten tried and tested marketing tips:

1. Understand your target market – As marketing campaigns should be geared towards your niche market, you must carefully study your customer to become an expert in your business. Marketing campaigns succeed because marketers know and understand their audience well. They not only fulfil their needs and wants, but they also create demand. Using proper market segmentation, recognizing your target market as can help creating an accurately targeted and profitable campaign.

2. Watch out your competitors – Aside from studying your target market, you should also study your competitors. It’s almost impossible to successfully promote your business unless you know what you’re up against. You need to determine what your competitors’ prices, guarantees, promotions, so that you can make your offer the most attractive and valuable to potential customers.

3. Concentrate on the offer – A marketing offer is the catalyst of marketing promotions that generates results. As a matter of fact, market testing has demonstrated that the offer is the most important factor for conversion. Concentrate on what you can offer to the market if you want to succeed.

4. Test the water – Don’t carry out any marketing campaign without running some tests. One of the most commonly used is a split test, which enables you to simultaneously assess two versions of your marketing material—whether it is a brochure, web page, email, etc. Split testing and other forms of testing can verify if your audience understands the message you are trying to convey, and can ultimately improve performance.

5. Work with others – Creative concepts usually stem from collaborating with other creative folks. So don’t feel obligated that you solely need to come up with out-of-the-box ideas. You may begin with an idea, but an open communication with other creative individuals will exponentially help generating fresh and interesting ideas. Involve your employees, which certainly have valuable insights to share about your customers.

6. Don’t always stress on the price – A lot of marketers fall short because they solely sell on affordability. Emphasizing the price can often lead to bargain war, low profitability, and even bankruptcy. Instead, concentrate on the benefits and your unique selling point (USP) that the price factor becomes virtually trivial.

7. Universal response – Take into consideration the entire user experience before launching a campaign. Check to see if your prospects are having a consistent user experience—whether you use email, website offer, etc. If they are, then your marketing campaigns certainly stand above 98% of your competitors.

8. After sales support – Marketing and networking with your niche market is an ongoing process. And being a professional marketer, it’s your responsibility to get to know and build relationships with your market segment—before and after making a sale. Consider sending informative emails or managing a blog to keep an interactive means of keeping in touch with prospects and customers.

9. Capitalize on integrated marketing – Using a single marketing technique won’t really drive you to success. It’s great to produce majority of your sales leads via PPC marketing if you must, but think about what will happen if that runs out. You need to have multiple marketing methods in place to constantly achieve your business goals.

10. Experience is still the best teacher – It’s a cliché for a reason—because it’s true and proven. You may hire all the best marketers in the planet, but you still have to do the hard work. And nothing beats the actual experience, which can definitely make you a better and more successful marketer in the long run.

But did you know that thank you pages do more than just showing gratitude? They offer a great opportunity (which many websites miss) to further win over your leads or prospects, people who have already shown interest in buying your products and or services. While they’re still on your site, keep them hooked using a well-crafted, customized thank you page.

To help you value and impress your leads, here are a few tips that you can apply on your thank you page when getting a website redesign:

Persuade your leads further – Since you’ve already acquired the lead, why not convince them more by reiterating that you’re the best choice. Show them supporting information on your thank you page, such as client feedback, case studies, etc. Keep the page concise and effective, making sure you get all the important points across. However, remember that while these pages are up on your site, people are always on the go and may not be able to check all those content. Use your thank you page as an opportunity to ensure your leads browse through essential information that will help you seal the deal and convert them into customers.

Bag that sale – Although you’re generous enough to offer a free product/trial of great value as a way to generate a lead, what you really long for is the actual sale. So why not utilise the potential of your thank you page to accomplish this goal? Simply provide them an opportunity to sign up for your products and or services. Anyway, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. And the best part is that you already have their information should you need to follow up or further convince them.

Make them call you – Most often than not, business owners prefer talking to a prospect instead of communicating via email. By inserting a click to call feature that has a strong call to action on your thank you page, it would be a good starting place for them to give you a ring.

Inform them what to expect – After completing the sign-up process, it’s crucial that you clearly explain what just happened, what will happen next, and what they need to do (if any). If you plan to contact them soon or give tips and other information in follow up emails, tell them exactly what to expect.

Remember to thank them! – Of course, as the term “thank you page” implies, don’t forget to thank your leads. Also, don’t just come up with a default thank you template but a personalized message to somehow make them feel special. A customized thank you page also provides a distinct impression that you’re interested in building a relationship with them, and not just “catching” them. As such, be sure to go the extra mile in showing gratitude, and make it more memorable than just a general one-liner.

Here are some of the benefits of link building:

Link Building Increases Your Page Rank – Your web page is measured on a scale of 1-10. And page rank is a key factor that determines where your web page will land when a user runs a search. Getting a high page rank means that your site has numerous links pointing towards it. The more links you have from external sites is equal to a better a ranking. Also, search engines would consider your website important.

Link Building Creates Direct Traffic - Link Building effectively helps in obtaining quality traffic from relevant sites, which also generates sales in the long run. Clicking a link from a reliable source is one of the fastest ways for people to learn about a new website. And if a user is on a trusted website, they are most likely to follow links that it suggests or that a user finds interesting or seem be informative.

Link Building Boosts Awareness - Consider an external link as an instant press release, spreading the word out there and providing a long term payoff even if your product/service is new in the market. Beyond awareness, link building as well creates visibility and credibility of your website. So, the more relevant links there are to your site, the more people will discover your site. Plus, if a user see your link from a popular or authority site, their level of trust in what you say or offer is likely to increase.

Link Building Facilitates in Search Engine Exposure and Indexing – If your website has more quality back links, it will be more easily accessible to the spiders and crawlers to know about your site, pick it up and index it. And if the number of relevant links are high enough, search engines will identify your website as highly credible.

Link Building Has Lots of Financial Gains – Aside from being one of the cheapest ways of promoting your website, link building is highly lucrative in several other ways. Getting relevant web traffic, in most scenarios, lead to conversions–whether buying your products or using your service, downloading your stuff, reading your content or clicking the ads on your site. Also, there are many website owners who are ready to exchange links. And if you develop a solid network of link exchanges, you can expect very high traffic free of charge.

With these many advantages, it’s obvious that link building is one of the most important aspects to making it on the World Wide Web.

When utilising keywords for your SEO campaign, you simply need to abide by a few guidelines to successfully find the right keywords that will pull off the job and to avoid errors when trying to optimise your website. Here are some useful tips to help you select relevant keywords for your SEO project:

Come up with a list – If you wish to use keywords effectively, start by making a list of important keywords or phrases related to the content of your website. Doing so can fundamentally lead to creating or discovering more keywords and phrases that may evolve from the ones you have initially chosen.

Choosing keywords or key phrases – After making a list, choose the ones that contain a “key” keyword or phrase that can help determine your web content. For example, your website is all about baby clothes, using “baby clothes” as keywords won’t land you high in the page ranking of search engines because many sites use “baby clothes” as their keywords. Avoid using words or phrases that are too general, as this will not be much helpful in improving your page ranking. Including other key terms to your chosen keywords, such as “trendy baby clothes” or “cheap baby clothes” will further augment your chances of getting a higher page rank. But of course, ensure that the added key terms are really relevant to your web content.

Monitor your competitors – It’s also helpful if you spend some time searching for keywords and phrases that your competitors are using, so that you can short list which ones to use and or avoid. It’s pointless to use keywords or phrases that are too competitive. And if your competitors are ranking high on search engines, you might have a hard time beating that. The more in demand a keyword is, the more challenging it is to rank well for it. Choosing a more conservative keyword would be much wiser.

Use your location – You can as well boost your luck of landing a better page rank if you integrate your location to the keywords or phrases you are using. For example, your business is located somewhere in Brisbane, by just adding the word “Brisbane” to your chosen keywords (Brisbane baby clothes), your site can already score higher in page ranking. Keep in mind though that this technique usually signifies that potential customers are planning on seeing you personally. So, use this method only if you are open to this idea.

Utilise your niche – Try choosing keywords that you specialise in, or at least those that are highly profitable. While you want to offer the best keywords or phrases that perfectly complement you business, if the search volume is gearing towards the one that isn’t your main product/service, you can still use it as long as it’s relevant to your site’s content.

SEO provides your marketing efforts the big push it requires. Whatever type of product or service you are offering, employing SEO techniques to bring your website to the front line of your target market will certainly give you the upper hand to be ahead of the competition.

SEO can get your business on the front page of search engines; afterwards, you’re very likely to accumulate more targeted traffic into your website—which also gives you more lead-generated revenue. Using keyword-rich, search engine friendly content all over your site will grant you the huge benefit of landing at the first top ten pages of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. As such, more searchers will click on your URL and check out what you actually offer.

SEO can help you boost brand recognition for your business. Remember that keywords/anchor texts are very important. As soon as you have linked your keywords to your products’ or services’ brand, you already have a big chance to make them extremely popular, which is synonymous to increased sales and more return of investment (ROI).

SEO effortlessly offers your website 24/7 online marketing in place, instant brand awareness and popularity across the world, more clicks and visits, and increased revenue and ROI.

To wrap up, it is crucial to utilize ethical Search Engine Optimization methods to your business’ advantage in gaining more sales.

Targeting these types of keywords has advantages and disadvantages. Find out more below.

Advantages of long tail keywords:

Lower competition – A lot of website owners use keywords that contain 1-2 popular words. By using long tail keywords, you can obtain an extra advantage over your competitors. Plus, it’s a lot easier to rank well and faster. But it is still recommendable to perform adequate keyword research before committing to such long tail keywords.

Higher conversion rate – Conversion is higher because long tail keywords mean that people know exactly what they are looking for. Searchers use long tail keywords to achieve specific results. When people look up information on the web, they usually type in one or two keywords to initially find what they are looking for. Though this generate results, when they type in more keywords, say “second-hand cars Sydney,” they achieve a better and more refined search result.

Useful with your rankings on main keywords – People generally use long tail keywords relevant to their primary keywords. A good technique would be using this additional content to link to your articles. More articles on related themes will definitely increase your search engine ranking.

Some disadvantages of long tail keywords:

Low search volume – Because long tail keyword is so specific, few people are searching for it. And the more specific it becomes, the lower the search volume gets. So, it’s crucial to carefully research and decide which long tail keywords are worth the effort and which ones are not.

You need many – Since the search volume is low, you need to target a number of long tail keywords to acquire more benefits.

The Conclusion:

You can’t survive the fierce competition without long tail keywords. Though it has a couple of disadvantages, they can definitely deliver high volumes of traffic.