Traffic To Your Website

Search engines are the #1 tool people use when shopping for products, services or information online. Optimize your website with the proper keywords or keyword phrases for your content and watch your traffic explode. If you gain an understanding of how to properly promote your website your efforts will reach it's full potential.

To rank relevantly within search engine results, each website must be considered relevant to a particular search algorithm for a given keyword or keyword phrase. Keyword selection can be a challenge to both experts and neophytes. While anyone can come up with various words that may be used when searching for their product or service, these words may not be the ideal mix for search engine ranking. Why? If a marketer chooses popular keyword phrases, he or she and a million other businesses compete for top placement. Top search engine ranking page (SERP) placement is dense, searchers typically giving up after the first three pages. To succeed, one must use relevant keywords or keyword phrases that are not being used by everyone else and that are searched for quite often. This may include misspellings and other alternative data. After finding relevant keywords and phrases, the results must encourage conversion or success based on each business’ criteria. For example, while it may be possible for a DVD rental firm to get top listings under the search criteria “free DVD rentals”, the person who visits is looking for free merchandise and will leave if its not found.

For optimal search engine rankings, a page will be optimized for only one to two popular but non-competitive keywords or keyword phrases.

Keyword Coding

HTML coding are two words most people never want to hear, especially in a learning environment. But it’s important to understand the basic web page header structure and where the search engines look to find key words for search engine ranking pages (SERP).

Sites rank highest when each page is optimized separately. For instance, a business may have one website with unlimited interlinking pages. The top page must be named “index.HTML.” While each sub-page may be named according to the designer or programmer’s preference. Ideally sub-pages are named according to the strongest keywords or keyword phrases for each business. Both the domain name and the URL or complete web address string, are important factors in determining search engine relevancy

Three important META tags are on each individual HTML page located between the “head” tags: description, keywords and title. The webpage description is the short sentence that displays after the listing name is the SERP’s. The keywords are not viewed by the casual surfer, but offer a clear-cut description of what is found on the website or who’s behind it. The title is the most condensed of all metatags. The title should repeat the top 1-2 keywords and describe what the site is about.

We can take the keyword theme as far as necessary, yet success through search engine optimization is not a 100% guaranteed way to gain top rankings and can often dilute the site and information quality by becoming a string of repetitive keywords, not value-added information. Some of these tactics include adding pages of keyword-rich articles solely to rank high. Another is developing a mini-empire of interrelated sites not for expert information, but solely to make the sites appear more important and relevant to the main site focus.

To ensure a small 30-page website is optimized, it must first renew keyword use each month to find the most popular terms for the three major search engines, Yahoo!, Google and MSN. Each page must be optimized for different but interdependent terms to strengthen the site as a whole. This involves new keyword research and website content for each page every month.

An example of a good ecommerce site using paid advertising instead of keyword optimization is buy automotive.com. Notice the content is relevant to the visitor entering and seeking the product. In contract, auto anything.com, a competitor site, relies heavily on keyword content, uses text that has no purpose and confuses the visitor with too many navigation links and useless words meant for search engines alone. Though this may gain rankings with work and keyword saturation, it can also damage a business reputation and ultimately lead to less sales.

Needless to say there are far more aspects to choosing the right keywords than I can cover in this article but the information provided here should give you a good insight into understanding how important it is to design a website that is keyword friendly.

Let’s face it, there is no magic bullet when it comes to successfully promoting your online business. There are pros and cons to almost everything you do. If you never develop a plan and put that plan into motion, you’ll never know if that’s the plan that will ultimately be the “magic bullet” that launches your online business to new found success.

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I found this article online and thought it might be useful for new Photoshop users!

The 5 Deadly Sins of Photoshop Compositing

By Admin - RaaVanaN

Photoshop is a wonderful program that allows you to edit a photograph in as many ways as you can imagine. It allows you to control every aspect of a photograph and gives you editing tools that a traditional photographer could only dream about. With this wide range of editing and compositing tools comes the ability to create fantastic works of art. With the rise in popularity of photography and personal computers, the door has been thrown open, now anyone with a half decent PC and a few spare dollars to buy PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS can and are calling themselves RETOUCHERS.

In the hands of a skilled user Photoshop can produce awe inspiring work; in the hands of a novice it can produce images of extremely poor quality. Unfortunately, as the popularity of the program grows and people become more and more exposed to these poor images, this lack of quality is becoming accepted as the norm. Here are the things to watch for when creating Photoshop compositions:

1) Feathered edges. When you make a selection, using the dancing ants around an area you wish to move, change, colour or otherwise edit, you have to feather the edge by at least 2-3 pixels (depending on the resolution of your image), in order to avoid the jagged edges we so often see in photo montages. Feathering creates a soft edge that blends the area of the selection with the area it abuts. Feathering an edge by a high value is also a useful way to fade out a selection.

2) Correct Perspective. If you have one element in an image that has a different geometrical perspective that does not match the rest of the image the whole image will look odd. A viewer will generally not know what is specifically wrong with the image, they will just know that it looks odd and generally undesirable. This is generally seen in buildings or cars that have been composited in from other images and not had their perspective adjusted to match the greater image as a whole. This would happen if two images shot at different focal lengths were then combined. An image from a 28mm lens combined with an image from a 200mm lens will need perspective adjustment to look right.

3) Correct Depth of Field. Images that have one object or area in focus and then behind that an object out of focus, and then behind that another object in focus will look very odd and be completely unbelievable. Like perspective, combining images shot with differing depth of field will require you to adjust the focus of the elements to correct the Depth of Field. One draw back, while it is possible to soften objects to make them appear out of focus or have short depth of field, it is next to impossible to sharpen soft objects to make them appear to be in focus. Depth of Field problems are one of the most common mistakes made in Photoshop compositions.

4) Direction of Light. When montaging images it is important to combine images shot with the same lighting conditions. The play of light on an object creates a series of shadows that have a specific directional play depending on where the light source was in relation to the object. If you montage together two images with differing light sources the image will look unreal and undesirable.

5) Colour cast. All images have a colour cast otherwise know as WHITE BALANCE, this is the HUE of the white areas. Also know as the colour temperature of an image. Be careful to adjust the colour cast of montaged images so that the white areas look the same, doing otherwise will render your images unreal and undesirable.

The human eye has an amazing ability to spot subtle changes in what it considers normal. Stare at a picture of a pink banana, after a short while the banana will start to appear yellow, but you will still have the feeling that something is not right. This also applies equally to Colour, Focus, Perspective and Light Direction. When creating montage images in Photoshop it is important to watch for mistakes in these areas as you will want to have your images look as real as possible and thus as desirable or aesthetically pleasing as possible. I have seen far too many images used in big advertising campaigns with blatant disregard for these basic principles. Done right Photoshop can create compelling compositions; done wrong and it just looks, well… wrong!

Sean David Baylis is a professional photographer who has been using the popular photo editing program Adobe Photoshop since 1994 version 2.5. He is considered by many an expert user and is called on to retouch major national ad campaigns and art books in addition to his own commercial and editorial work. Examples of Sean’s work can be seen at http://www.sdbphoto.com

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Create a simple logo

Today we will discuss some of the simple tricks to create a logo as follows



Follow the following steps

1. Create a blank image of size 1 inch x 1 inch. Make sure you keep the background as transparent.

2. Select the Type Tool and type the character you wanted to make the logo with. I have chosen the character "i".

3. Make the font size such that it occupies the 60% of the image canvas. For e.g. it should be Font "Times New Roman, 60, Italics, Strong"

4. Apply the Drop Shadow, Bevel and Emboss and stroke with the following specification.

a) Drop Shadow -

Blend Mode - Multiply
Color - Black
Opacity - 45%
Distance - 0 px
Spread - 5 %
Size - 10 px

b) Bevel and Emboss -

There is no editing and all the default for the bevel and emboss would be fine.

c) Stroke - 3 px, Outside, and choose the color of the shadow to be closer to gray. I have opted in the above sample as #E6E6E6.

5. Add a new layer and draw an eclipse with the Ellipse tool. The color can be anything of the ellipse as we will be applying the effects on the ellipse in the next couple of steps.

6. Change the foreground color to the orange (FF7D00) and background to be yellow (FFF900)

7. Select the Gradient Overlay (Reverse) on the newly created layer with blend mode as Normal.

That's it you have the logo ready. Attachment contains the .psd file for the above logo.

Attached Files

img-src.zip (10.6 KB, 24 views)

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Graphic File Formats for Graphics on the Web

Before starting this article I want readers to know what a pixel is. Pixel is short for Picture Element. A pixel is a single point in a graphic image. Graphics monitors display pictures by dividing the display screen into thousands (or millions) of pixels, arranged in rows and columns. The pixels are so close together that they appear connected. The number of bits used to represent each pixel determines how many colors or shades of gray can be displayed. For example, in 8-bit color mode, the color monitor uses 8 bits for each pixel, making it possible to display 2 to the 8th power (256) different colors or shades of gray.

On color monitors, each pixel is actually composed of three dots a red, a blue, and a green one. Ideally, the three dots should all converge at the same point, but all monitors have some convergence error that can make color pixels appear fuzzy.

The quality of a display system largely depends on its resolution, how many pixels it can display, and how many bits are used to represent each pixel. VGA systems display 640 by 480, or about 300,000 pixels. In contrast, SVGA systems display 800 by 600, or 480,000 pixels. True Color systems use 24 bits per pixel, allowing them to display more than 16 million different colors.

Following are the most commonly used graphics file formats for putting graphics on the World Wide Web and how each differs from the others.

JPEG/JPG vs. GIF vs. PNG - What is the difference?

JPEG/JPG:

Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the original name of the committee that wrote the standard. JPG is one of the image file formats supported on the Web. JPG is a lossy compression technique that is designed to compress color and grayscale continuous-tone images. Lossy compression refers to data compression techniques in which some amount of data is lost. Lossy compression technologies attempt to eliminate redundant or unnecessary information. Most video compression technologies, such as MPEG, use a lossy technique.

The information that is discarded in the compression is information that the human eye cannot detect. JPG images support 16 million colors and are best suited for photographs and complex graphics. The user typically has to compromise on either the quality of the image or the size of the file. JPG does not work well on line drawings, lettering or simple graphics because there is not a lot of the image that can be thrown out in the lossy process, so the image loses clarity and sharpness.

With the explosion of scanners, digital cameras and the World Wide Web, the JPEG image format has quickly become the most widely used digital image format.

A useful property of JPEG is that the degree of lossiness can be varied by adjusting compression parameters. This means that the image maker can trade off file size against output image quality. You can make extremely small files if you don't mind poor quality; this is useful for applications such as indexing image archives. Conversely, if you aren't happy with the output quality at the default compression setting, you can jack up the quality until you are satisfied, and accept lesser compression.

There are two good reasons: to make your image files smaller, and to store 24-bit-per-pixel color data instead of 8-bit-per-pixel data.

Making image files smaller is a win for transmitting files across networks and for archiving libraries of images. Being able to compress a 2 Mbyte full-color file down to, say, 100 Kbytes makes a big difference in disk space and transmission time! And JPEG can easily provide 20:1 compression of full-color data. If you are comparing GIF and JPEG, the size ratio is usually more like 4:1.

The second fundamental advantage of JPEG is that it stores full color information: 24 bits/pixel (16 million colors). GIF, the other image format widely used on the net, can only store 8 bits/pixel (256 or fewer colors).

Within a couple of years, GIF will probably seem as obsolete as black-and-white MacPaint format does today. Furthermore, JPEG is far more useful than GIF for exchanging images among people with widely varying display hardware, because it avoids prejudging how many colors to use. Hence JPEG is considerably more appropriate than GIF for use as a Usenet and World Wide Web standard photo format.

GIF

Short for Graphics Interchange Format, another of the graphics formats supported by the Web. Unlike JPG, the GIF format is a lossless compression technique and it supports only 256 colors. Lossless compression refers to data compression techniques in which no data is lost. The PKZIP compression technology is an example of lossless compression. For most types of data, lossless compression techniques can reduce the space needed by only about 50%. For greater compression, one must use a lossy compression technique. Note, however, that only certain types of data -- graphics, audio, and video -- can tolerate lossy compression. You must use a lossless compression technique when compressing data and programs.

GIF is better than JPG for images with only a few distinct colors, such as line drawings, black and white images and small text that are only a few pixels high. With an animation editor, GIF images can be put together for animated images. GIF also supports transparency, where the background color can be set to transparent in order to let the color on the underlying Web page to show through. The compression algorithm used in the GIF format is owned by Unisys, and companies that use the algorithm are supposed to license the use from Unisys.

JPEG is not going to displace GIF entirely; for some types of images, GIF is superior in image quality, file size, or both. One of the first things to learn about JPEG is which kinds of images to apply it to.

Generally speaking, JPEG is superior to GIF for storing full-color or gray-scale images of "realistic" scenes; that means scanned photographs, continuous-tone artwork, and similar material. Any smooth variation in color, such as occurs in highlighted or shaded areas, will be represented more faithfully and in less space by JPEG than by GIF.

GIF does significantly better on images with only a few distinct colors, such as line drawings and simple cartoons. Not only is GIF lossless for such images, but it often compresses them more than JPEG can. For example, large areas of pixels that are all exactly the same color are compressed very efficiently indeed by GIF. JPEG can't squeeze such data as much as GIF does without introducing visible defects.

Computer-drawn images, such as ray-traced scenes, usually fall between photographs and cartoons in terms of complexity. The more complex and subtly rendered the image, the more likely that JPEG will do well on it. The same goes for semi-realistic artwork (fantasy drawings and such).But icons that use only a few colors are handled better by GIF.

GIF format supports transparency. This allows a graphic designer to designate the background of the image transparent. This means that if you place a transparent GIF in a yellow table cell, the background color of that image will turn yellow.

The interlacing feature in a GIF file creates the illusion of faster loading graphics. What happens is that an image is presented in a browser in several steps. At first it will be fuzzy and blurry, but as more information is downloaded from the server, the image becomes more and more defined until the entire image has been downloaded. It's important to note that interlaced GIF files will usually be a bit larger than non-interlaced ones, so use interlacing only when it makes sense.

Generally, GIF files should be used for logos, line drawings and icons. Avoid using it for photographic images, and graphics which have long stretches of continuous-tone in them. When you're designing GIF files, avoid using gradients and turn off anti-aliasing where possible to minimize the file size.

PNG

Short for Portable Network Graphics, the third graphics standard supported by the Web (though not supported by all browsers). PNG was developed as a patent-free answer to the GIF format but is also an improvement on the GIF technique. An image in a lossless PNG file can be 5%-25% more compressed than a GIF file of the same image. PNG builds on the idea of transparency in GIF images and allows the control of the degree of transparency, known as opacity. Saving, restoring and re-saving a PNG image will not degrade its quality. PNG does not support animation like GIF does.

The PNG format provides a portable, legally unencumbered, well-compressed, well-specified standard for lossless bitmapped image files.

Although the initial motivation for developing PNG was to replace GIF, the design provides some useful new features not available in GIF, with minimal cost to developers.

Unisys announced in 1995 that it would require people to pay licensing fees in order to use GIF. This does not mean that anyone who creates or uses a GIF image has to pay for it. Authors writing programs that output GIF images are subject to licensing fees.
GIF features retained in PNG include:
Indexed - color images of up to 256 colors.

Streamability: files can be read and written serially, thus allowing the file format to be used as a communications protocol for on-the-fly generation and display of images.

Progressive display: a suitably prepared image file can be displayed as it is received over a communications link, yielding a low-resolution image very quickly followed by gradual improvement of detail.

Transparency: portions of the image can be marked as transparent, creating the effect of a non-rectangular image.

Ancillary information: textual comments and other data can be stored within the image file.

Complete hardware and platform independence.

Effective, 100% lossless compression.
Important new features of PNG, not available in GIF, include:

Truecolor images of up to 48 bits per pixel.

Grayscale images of up to 16 bits per pixel.

Full alpha channel (general transparency masks).

Image gamma information, which supports automatic display of images with correct brightness/contrast regardless of the machines used to originate and display the image.

Reliable, straightforward detection of file corruption.

Faster initial presentation in progressive display mode.

PNG is designed to be:

Simple and portable: developers should be able to implement PNG easily.

Legally unencumbered: to the best knowledge of the PNG authors, no algorithms under legal challenge are used. (Some considerable effort has been spent to verify this.)

Well compressed: both indexed-color and truecolor images are compressed as effectively as in any other widely used lossless format, and in most cases more effectively.

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