Hiring a Web Designer (TIPs)

Hiring a Web Designer? (recently involved in HR activity)

Designing plays a very important role in an organization, because it is through that, reader is attracted towards the site. Every organization will have a separate designing team or department to cater the requirements and services of their clients. Many times it happens that in the process of recruiting a designer, you may get many second thoughts about the interviewee professional skills. In order to steer clear your mystification I have provided you below few interesting points which you can negotiate with the web designer.

Have knowledge about CMS package?

 In this present era, a web designer must have definitely idea about the CMS package. At the same time you need to find out if it is open source or proprietary knowledge they have. Open source is broadly utilized software and the proprietary is where the HTML code has been written by the Web designer itself. Depending on company requirements, you can choose the web designer.

Will you be able to design the portfolio that meets my creative requirements?

Before actually making a final decision about recruiting the web designer, it is important to scrutinize the former portfolio on which he/she worked. This makes you to fathom the creative skills and also helps you to decide if they are a perfect choice for your company.

Do you follow any particular efficient web design practices?

It is most common that clients have different questions in their mind before actually giving the project to the company. It is the responsibility of the company or designing team to do cent percent justification for the designing. So it is imperative to ask the interviewee if they stick to any particular web designs or they can work with all the designs.

Do you have knowledge about Search Engine Optimization?

These days usage of SEO techniques has become mandatory for websites. Designing a website with out actually discussing the SEO needs of the company will be dangerous and will have a disastrous impact in the future. So a web designer who has SEO knowledge will be a helping hand to your company progress.

Are you in to Social media?

These days you can hardly find a person who is not into social media like face book, twitter, orkut, stumble upon and various other social networking sites. They are the motivating force for traffic generation and connectivity. You must definitely ask them if they are active in social media and can they survive up to your requirements.

Can we maintain a good rapport?

Every company has their own rules and regulation while signing an agreement with the clients. The person whom you select as the designer must be able to understand your company demands and act accordingly else there can arise the miscommunication that leads to fall of your company’s reputation. Make sure that you and the designer have perfect co-ordination.

Do you have the ability to work with in my budget and can provide me some references?

One of the most important things that you should clarify with the designer is the budget that you afford to him. Negotiate in a simple manner and clear the confusion as early as possible. If you have chosen the designer based up on the advice of a professional then it is well and good else it is beneficial if you can ask the web designer to provide some references who actually worked with him. This will actually expose the work and the passion for the job.

Web designers come with exceptional talents in different streams. Don’t ever judge them on a basis if they are not able to meet your requirements. Because the person who is average for you may cater the best needs of the other company.

Twitter strategies that you should know........

 Most of us failed while using Twitter as a brand-building tool. At the same time we were not able to get influencers who would re-tweet us. With the introduction of Twitter, branding has resulted in instructive course of action.  Now it has become imperative for the companies to teach their staff and clients about smart engagement, genuine conversation, useful links, consistency, trickery brand worthy of their company. The companies which aren’t aware of social media or lack the manpower who are efficient in using it overtime can lead in to form of brand killing. Such companies must first raise the step in protecting their brand.

Given below are few brand killers of Twitter strategy:

Talking-heads tweets:

Attending business conferences or participating in a universal event, hash tags are a method for tweeters to combine and form a unique resemblance. Most of the well targeted hash tag driven small areas often result in becoming an arcade of talking heads. It’s all about brand progress dead end.

Auto Tweets:

Programmed tweets are on the spot brand killers and are shoddier than spambots. The twitter version of converting the novice followers into leads and producing auto-DMS will risk in misplacing followers. The scheduled tweets when compared to auto tweets are not so terrible but they call for caution and knowledge. You need to immobilize the automator and arrange the scheduled tweets with caution. Need to take a big step when it is mandatory and scrub out if the content is extraneous.

Sandwich tweets:

Most of us dislike Sandwich tweets. It is a form of tweet where the user or consumer donates to the cause of consuming a sandwich! It is deficient of substance. It offers no chance for extra chatter in personal terms and offers detested opportunities from professional perspective.

Troll tweets:

It is not regarding distorted old age men tweeting forcefully from underside bridges. It is all regarding the ones who contaminate the Twitter ecosystem by pitching malicious messages in to the each. It is not that Twitter must result in bonfire of the new niceness that abruptly becomes web chic. But it should continue to remain a dynamic place to socialize in terms of professionalism and personal. Troll tweets don’t fall into any category. The only thing that they really work on well is shutting down the productive conversation. You have to be good or be a B2B bete noire.

Copy cat tweets:

There exist few users who aren’t aware of social media and haven’t detailed or decided any branding strategy. They generally block the eco system by retweeting instead of original content. And there comes the hindrance with this loom that it never accounts into anything than a water-down aggregator. This implicates that they are remaining in the gloom of industry instead of shining out. The users need to be original and unique in the way of approach.

NSFW tweets:

The progress of business nattering is nosy at best. With the trend of social media, we are in the times where sharing is too casual and at the same time it’s confusing. It is imperative to be casual at the same time it has to keep in mind that we are professionals. Keeping a tab on the medium of respect, language spoken and in case if you want to share any dirty jokes then doing them off the record will not put your brand low. The professional brand when compared to personal brand takes much time to recover from

massive social media breakdown.

Tone-deaf Tweets:

It is very important to have a tone that is unique while using Twitter. While coyly mannered tones work for showbiz personalities. Knowing one’s limits and sticking to a reliable tone will fetch you. Talking what is necessary on the Twitter will save your face else the brand value will run down.

Vacuum Tweets:

Asking questions is one of the greatest methods to benefit your Twitter mix. The questions illustrate that you are expecting reaction from the followers. But in profusion, it actually kills the plan. If most of the tweets that you tweet are full of questions then it lasts an impression that you are inexperienced. This will narrow down the brand value of the company. Instead of posing questions it’s actually better to create an opportunistic and interactive, inspiring environment.

Eavesdropping Tweets:

Imagine a situation where you along with your friends are talking something important and suddenly a third person interrupts and oppose your flow of speech. Wouldn’t it anger your temper? Definitely the same happens with the tweets that you display on Twitter. It is very important that you do not dictate words between the conversations of two persons. Until and unless the tweet that you engage between two people is worth don’t impose it. Learning rules before you breaking them is important. 

Starting a PPC project???

Developing a PPC campaign with out any proper structure will make you land in to serious risks and problems in future. It is very important to have a perfect plan and design while dealing with the PPC project. Keeping in mind, I have set a few guidelines in starting a PPCproject. Let’s have a look at them.

Decision maker: While working on a PPC project you come across various people who

stand for your client. They are also a part of the project and have their own set of opinions but it is your responsibility to decide the authority over the project. In case if you do not determine this, you may have to face problems in the future.

Fee details: Initially before making an agreement with the client, it is imperative to think how much the client would get as a profit and what is your share in that? You should also negotiate on time limitations in order to optimize the campaign and for meeting customer expectations.

Budget matters: One of the key matters that has to be focused while the campaign development procedure is Budget of the client. If you really are not aware of the budget and has already developed a strategy then you cannot meet client expectations. With out knowing the budget, you aren’t supposed to confer important points of the campaign.

Conversion: What do you think about the conversion? In many instances, it becomes easy to appreciate about the conversion by seeing the client site. Every person has his/her own thoughts, like wise your client may have different opinions for services, products. Some times they want emails, phone calls or do not need any conversion at all. You need to first clearly fathom about the conversions needed, their value, tracking of the conversion that in turn sets the way for reporting and campaigning.

Campaign goals: Every client has their own goal in the campaigning process. But it is your responsibility to aim at client expectations and have goals wherein you both together are of the same mind on to evaluate the campaign victory. If at all the client is not aware of the goals then you may not able to be with them for a long period. In this situation, you should be capable to consent CPA goal, leads, etc. This has to be both aggressive and attainable goal to get the best out of the campaign. The goals can be re-examined in case they are too lofty.

Campaign time period: There are generally two kinds of campaigns. They are small term and lengthy term campaigns. If you have a time period of only six-eight weeks to deal with the campaign, then you have to be more aggressive compared to six months campaign.

In the initial stages of the novice campaign, there is a time period where you may not be able to meet the goals of the client. Landing pages, ads, keywords, searching for the right mix of bids and optimization of the content will generally take long period. It is your job to educate the client on this and see that they make it up.

Creative resource: It is crucial to confer with the client if they have a designer of their own to design the landing pages and banners. In very minute cases, you may use the clients’ site for PPC landing pages. You need to discuss if they have a designer to design these landing pages or you have to bear the designer fees. If at all they have a designer, then you have to clear the terms if he can help you in the development of banners and pages. And in case if the designer is a novice in designing the landing pages, then you have to guide him through out the process for a successful campaign.

In most of the cases, it is important for the clients to look over the keywords and the ad text that you use. This is applicable in big industries which have brand rules and regulations. So it is important to know if the client is looking a head for any approval or review before finalizing the process.

Usually few industries have set their own restrictions about advertising. They may consist of few websites in which their ads cannot become visible for which you are supposed to obstruct from networking campaigns. They can’t offer the opportunity of shipping process to some states due to various legal statements. They may have already surveyed about the campaigning and have their choice of opinions which can work and which cannot. It is necessary to ask the intelligence sources of the company before starting the campaign, which in turn will save the energy and time. 

One of the important things that you have to do in a PPC campaign is to detect the opponents of the client. In the study, you may find the client competitors who do not have any online presence or no advertising. So inquiring the customer about their rivalry will pave the way for a lucid vision about the keywords to be used. Some times the client may have pleasant accord with the opponent in usage of the keywords, so you have to know about them.

Client communication: In this cutthroat era, every one has their own set of expectations from the promoter. There are few of them who are lenient and ask only for monthly news. At the same time they are few of them who require daily reports or weekly reports about the campaign procedure. So, it is essential to converse with the customer about their expectations and act accordingly to steer clear of the risks and problems. 

WordPress SEO plug-ins that help you in many ways

Word Press SEO plug-ins that help you in many ways

In the recent era, Wordpress occupies the position of being the most admirable tool for publishing the content online or in the web world. Various kinds of features can be added and also can be used as blog, e-commerce websites etc. With the introduction of plug-ins, free themes, categories, tools it has become a cake-walk for many novice organizations to publish their content. Just publishing the mere content will not achieve results; along with that using technology will fetch you a lot. Given below is the list of Word Press plug-ins for Search Engine Optimization that progress the sites rank.

a)      SEO Rank reporter:

Many of you all are interested in knowing the traffic that comes to your site. Usually the traffic is measured using different tools which are expensive. To make you feel good on Word Press site, SEO rank reporter plug-in is used. It is a tool in the admin panel that offers easy ranking measurement. This permits you to add certain keywords in the site and at the same time it also produces a report for every 3 days. When there are changes taking place in search engine ranking, then all these changes are alerted to you with an email.

b)      SEO Content control:

One of the key factors that affect the Search Engine Optimization is the quality of the content. The site’s ranking will go down in case the quality of the content is poor or is duplicated. The SEO Content control tool helps you to overcome problems like missing of a Meta tag or the posts with less content etc. This makes the blog to look attractive and will persuade the reader to read your blog. It increases the ranking of your site.

c)      All in One SEO pack:

The All in One Search Engine Optimization pack is another best feature proffered by Word Press and is a perfect solution for all problems. It helps in optimizing the site page titles and search engines by producing Meta tags. The advanced search engine optimization users are offered the freedom to customize tags, Canonical URL structures, descriptions and titles. And if you are new to Word Press then downloading this tool is a gift. Also has the backward-compatibility option with wide range of plug-ins like warrior, ultimate tags, auto Meta tags and many others.

d)      SEO Friendly image:

Another friendly option from Word Press is Search Engine Optimization friendly images that insert TITLE and ALT attributes to your images or photographs. If at all initially you are not set with TITLE and ALT then SEO friendly will make the necessary changes to the site.  The ALT attribute is an imperative part and explains the images to search engine and if a user is searching for this kind of image then this works as an important factor. The TITLE attribute does not play a high role but it is indispensable for the traffic as this data will involuntarily become visible in the tool tip when the user clicks the image.

These plug-ins when installed on your site will create wonders and improve your page ranking. Though in the initial stages, you may not understand but later once you get grip then things will go smoothly. 

Bye Bye Content Farms, Google searching the right mix to offer the right search

Google has taken a well appreciated step towards offering its customer the better search results by filtering out the copied contents and unwanted data. As per the officials from Google, they have taken the first step towards improving the search results by changing its algorithm. This change is said to affect 11.8 percent of the queries and though this incremental change will not show initially, it will definitely offer a big change in the search results in long run. This change will be applied in the US market first and later on introduced all over the world but one thing is clear from all these that very shortly you will find only original content as well as thorough research and analysis on the websites.

Change will affect the content farms too

The said change will affect the content farms a lot. They will now definitely start working towards offering better and original content. Yahoo is aiming to hire about 400,000 writers just to generate content merely in terms of quantity will now hire only those writers that will offer the quality content and not the quantity content. It is usually observed that people searching for anything don’t go beyond the first page of search results and hence the ranking of many websites are increased just by adding unnecessary content.

No direct link with Personal Blocklist on Google Chrome

The changes in algorithm made by Google are not directly based on its new product Personal Blocklist that is launched on Google Chrome. The personal blocklist enables the users to block the portals they don’t want to view in their search results and after the change in algorithm it is estimated that about 84% of such blocked domains will get affected. Hence, it is a clear indication that what users want is just what is going to happen after this change.

Better Content and precise search

Once this change will be introduced all over the world, it is quite apparent that the search results will become more precise and the contents that the users will get would be more accurate and reliable. It would be a good move in the search engine industry and the outcome would be the benefit of users. The content farms will be affected for better as they will start delivering only original research content and no more spam.

Do SEO Experts Know All Search Types?

SEO experts are familiar with three primary search types, including:

• Informational search: It involves search for a specific topic.
• Navigational search: It involves search for specific website or web page.
• Transactional search: It involves search for information required to purchase a product or service.

Besides, there are other types of searches that most of the SEO experts don’t take into account. The following discussion helps the inexperienced SEO experts to recognize other search types that can help you achieve improved search engine rankings.

Ad Hoc Search

Consider an online surfer who is completely unfamiliar with a particular topic. While searching for the information, the user would like to find all possible documents relevant to the topic. A good example in this regard could be of reviews related to a particular product. So, what SEO experts should do is write reviews for the business products and services of their websites embedding important search keywords in it.

Search for Known Items

A searcher might prefer to use a search engine to search for a specific website or web page he had already visited in the past. In fact, it is a usual practice of online searchers to search for the known items using search engines only. The reason for this is that most of the searchers don’t remember the exact URL of the website, but some special part of it. For example, login page of Google Adwords. If the user directly wants to reach the login page, he would sue search engine and queries like “google adwords login”.

So, what’s the role of SEO experts in this? An SEO expert must optimize each and every page of the website using title tag, Meta tag, heading and other things.

Search for Named Pages

An online searcher who had already visited a named page of a website in past would like to recall it using search engines. To explain it better, consider the website of a health clinic specializing in the treatment of a cancer. So, a page of the website might be named as “cancer treatment”. So, a searcher might use the query like “cancer treatment ABC”, where ABC refers to the name of the organization. An SEO expert need to optimize such named pages of the website effectively.

By constantly viewing the search behavior of various online users, an SEO expert can implement features of various search types in the client’s website.

Extend Your SEO Expertise by Building Proficiency in Your Niche

What do the SEO experts and search marketers usually lack? What restrains these experts from becoming top performers is lack of expert knowledge in the industries they work for. At this stage, it is endurable to have little knowledge about the business niche. Still, many new online businesses are beginners in employing SEO strategies. So, an expert in SEO can easily keep ahead of them. But, the situation is going to change very soon.

Those who lack knowledge about their business niches come out with average content, which is passable for the time being. But, the future search marketers would require making use of their knowledge base to generate quality content. There will be tough competition among the websites to get top ranked in the search space. Then, only the experts in niche and SEO would make it to the height. Here are some of the advantages of having niche expertise:

To be innovative: Those having expertise in their niche can discover innovative solutions to be on the top of the search space. They are innovative in creating fresh content and also in attempting new ways of link building.

To be a predictor: Staying ahead of rival businesses require one to predict the upcoming trends of the industry. Those having the knowledge of the past and present of the industry can utilize their knowledge to predict the future trends.

To be unique: Search engines are always in need of fresh content. However, most of the content they index is an attempt to be unique. With knowledge of your niche, you can be unique in presenting the ideas and content which is fresh and more informative.

To be fast: Experts in their niche can deliver content at a faster rate and thus, stay ahead from others.

To be a real expert: The knowledge of niche can draw the line between a mediocre and an expert. When you start utilizing your niche knowledge to entertain the query of your audiences, you are placed in the category of the real experts.

How to Obtain Niche Knowledge

Obtaining niche knowledge is similar to building SEO expertise. You must start reading books and watching videos related to the industry for which you work. Even the blogs of experts in that industry can help you in this. Remember that it is not all about researching a niche, but it involves a process of continuous learning about the niche.

With a great combination of SEO expertise and niche expertise, you can definitely have better returns on investment.