SEO – The Trend For Present World

Search engines have become as important as oxygen in our life. It’s always necessary to find the right information, at the right time. Many different web companies and agencies providing Search Engine Optimization, or SEO services are so much in demand these days. Although its initiation dates back to as early as the starting phase of 1990s, it is only much recently that it gained high priority in every company’s to-do lists. For the past few years, SEO has revolutionized how information is presented and accessed over the Internet.

The whole idea of Search Engine Optimization involves the task to improve the visibility of a web page or a website, during searches in various search engines. By understanding the trends of searches done by the target audience in the search engines, and the different algorithmic pattern of search followed by these search engines, SEO companies can provide you with high rankings. Only then can your website or webpage feature at the top of the search results in the most preferred search sites like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Alta Vista, and many others.

SEO began with webmasters, who used SEO to improve ranking for their own websites. After this was succeeded they started to offer their services on SEO marketing websites. The fact is that search engines use crawlers to search for new websites on the Internet. When a new website is found the crawler will follow the links on that page and start indexing it in the search results. Nowadays, When SEO companies try to conduct optimization they will optimize content and html code of a website to improve indexing and loading time. When conducting SEO many factors are involved to achieve top ranking. Factors like distance of the home page to other internal pages is an important factor and influence indexing and PageRank. Fancy flash files or other dynamic content can cause problems to get indexed. So it is always advisable not to go for such fancy elements or hire a professional SEO consultant to give you advice how to implement such graphic elements into your website.

Secondly, building one way links can help to increase ranking of webpages and websites dramatically. Basically, the algorithm of search engines involves links placed on other websites pointing to your site This can improve the visibility, and provide a better ranking.

Since the competition in search engines is huge it is important to choose the right SEO company to conduct the online marketing campaign for you. More and more SEO companies are springing up each month, with the intention of providing you with the best optimization techniques and skills. But in case you are interested in SEO not just compare prices, you should always go forth with a reputed and renowned company, having considerable experience in this field.

Billy Horner, is one of the founders of SEO-WATCH, a European managed web site design, SEO and web based application development firm in Thailand. Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including all information. Please include the two hyperlinks to: web design Pattaya [http://www.webdesignpattaya.net/] and our other web site with SEO Thailand when using this article in newsletters or online.

PowerPoint Tip – Secrets For Successfully Narrating a Presentation

When you add narration to a presentation, especially with slide timings, you create a self-running presentation. It’s almost a video-like effect. Such a presentation is great for sending to potential customers on a CD, posting on your website or a presentation-sharing site, or displaying at a trade show or in your company’s lobby.

Usually, I prefer to record my voice using Audacity, a free sound recorder and editor.  If you download it, be sure to also read the instructions for, and download, the LAME MP3 encoder, which lets you save files in MP3 format. The advantage is that it’s easier to edit the files, in case you tend to trip over your own tongue, as I do!

However, recently I wanted to post a presentation with narration at authorSTREAM.com. This slide sharing site has some nice benefits:

    * You can upload presentations with embedded sound

    * It plays many animations

    * You can convert presentations of under 5 minutes to video for free, to post at video-sharing sites (like YouTube) or on your own site.

But the sound must be embedded, which means using the narration feature (or doing a trick with MP3′s to make PowerPoint think they’re WAV files-because PowerPoint can only embed WAV files).

** Get the best quality sound

So I tried the narration feature and discovered that the quality was awful! There was a huge amount of noise in the background. When I tried used the same equipment in Audacity, the sound was just fine. That’s when I discovered the first secret: CD quality.

To start narration, you go to the Slide Show tab and click Record Narration (in 2002/2003 choose Slide Show> Record Narration).  Click the Set Microphone Level button to set and test your audio setup.

Then be sure to click the Change Quality button! You need to do this every single time; you can’t change the default.

Change the quality when you narrate

Then, in the Sound Selection dialog box, choose CD Quality from the Name drop-down list, and click OK twice to start narrating.

Use CD Quality for your narration

You then go into Slide Show view automatically. Narrate the presentation, clicking to move from slide to slide. At the end, you’ll be asked if you want to save the slide timings. Do so to set the timings for each slide to match the narration.

** Edit narration successfully

If you make a mistake, you can re-narrate a slide. Go to the slide, re-open the Record Narration dialog box and start again. Record the narration for that slide and then press Esc. Be careful not to go to the next slide.

However, if your new narration is longer than the original, you may run into a recognized problem-truncated narrations! This can be very frustrating. It apparently happens because PowerPoint saves narration timings separately from slide timings. Even if you increase the timing for the slide, PowerPoint will truncate the narration!

I’m going to tell you what Microsoft says to do and then tell you what worked for me.

Microsoft’s instructions are:

1. Make sure that all animations are set to advance on mouse click and not automatically.

2. If the last item to be animated on the slide is a text frame of an AutoShape that contains text, create one new shape and place it outside of the slide’s area. Set the shape’s Custom Animation setting to Appear. Make sure that the shape is the last item to animate and that it is set to animated on a mouse click.

3. Make sure that any slide transitions are set to advance on a mouse click and not automatically.

4. Re-record the narration and click No when asked if youwant to save the slide timings.

5. Preview the presentation in Slide Show view manually and check the narrations.

6. Then add the automatic slide and animation timings.

No matter what I did, my new narration was cut off. I made it shorter than the original and still the same amount was cut off. Finally, I realized that that the problem wasn’t the length. PowerPoint was cutting off a certain amount no matter what the length. So, I recorded a silent period at the end  of a narration. Then, when PowerPoint cut it off, I was fine!

Product Managers Know That Pricing Is All About The Presentation

How to correctly price a product has always been a bit of a black art for most product managers. The goal is to not price a product so high that nobody is willing to buy it, while at the same time not pricing it so low that you end up leaving money on the table. It turns out that the correct way to price a product has to do with its parts, not with its cost…

What Do Your Customers Value?

Pricing for a product comes down to two things: what are your customers willing to pay for the product and how satisfied will they be with the amount that they ended up paying for it? In order to create a price that will meet both of these customer expectations, product managers need to find the best way to present their product’s benefits to their customers.

This is where the problems first show up. All too often product managers spend their time (often at the request of their senior management) focusing on the cost of their product when instead they should be worried about communicating the product’s benefits.

The correct way to go about pricing your product is to view it not as a complete product, but rather as a collection of components (product, accessories, support, configuration options, documentation, etc.). Each component does not have the same value to your customer. This means that product managers need to take the time to carefully price each component so that it closely matches the value that the customer places on that particular component.

What Customer Pricing Experiments Show

Researchers Dr. Rebecca Hamilton and Dr. Joydeep Srivastava have studied how customers value different components of a product. They used auto repairs as the product that was being offered and they identified three different components of this product: parts, labor, and shipping (of the parts).

In their studies, the researchers discovered that customers valued parts more than labor, and parts more than shipping. The take-away from this research was that customers assigned a higher price to those things that they viewed as providing them with a higher benefit.

An important lesson for product managers came from the second part of the researcher’s study. Here they dropped the price for labor to nothing. That made customers nervous – somewhat surprisingly they preferred to pay at least something for this component. Clearly, dropping the price of a product’s component below an accepted threshold doesn’t make the product more attractive – it actually makes it less attractive.

Three Guidelines

The end result of the studies were the creation of three guidelines for product managers who are getting ready to price their products:

It’s All About Needs: Product managers need to make sure that they fully understand their customer’s needs. If your car battery needs to be replaced, you will be willing to visit a store and pay full price for a new battery and a big discount on the motor oil that you’ll need later instead of visiting another store that can offer you a small discount on both.
Bundles Work: The researchers found that product managers who can combine both high-value and low value components together in packages do the best. They also caution that a product manager should only take the step of offering low-value components for free if that is what the current market will allow.
Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: If a product that you are responsible for has a benefit that you think that customers should be placing a greater value on, then it is the responsibility of the product manager to do something about it. Specifically, you need to find ways to clearly communicate the value of that component to your customer in order to boost its value.
What All Of This Means For You

In the end, what your customers are going to be willing to pay for your product is going to depend on how valuable they view it as being. Product managers need to understand that their customers don’t see their product as a blob, instead they see it as a collection of multiple components that they place different values on.

In order to price a product correctly, product managers need to break their product up into the components that their customers see. Then those components need to be matched to your customer’s goals – what do they really value? Finally, high and low benefit components can be grouped together in order to boost your customer’s willingness to pay for the product.

Nobody ever said that pricing a product correctly was going to be easy. However, taking the time to understand how your customer views your product and the value that they put on the different components of your product is the key to doing pricing correctly. Get this right, and you’ll have found the secret to being a successful product manager!