Recently, I was faced with an issue regarding resizing an image to a larger size. I wanted to enlarge this image to be the same size as our booth display for an upcoming conference.  However, the only size we had available was 3×5 inches at 300dpi. Any thing poster size or larger was going to have some pixel problems.

A couple of our designers had just attended an Adobe Photoshop seminar and came back with this cool trick to enlarge an image without losing quality.

In Adobe Photoshop, go to Image, and then Image Size. If your image is not 300 dpi, go ahead and switch it without resampling. Then, with resampling on, begin bumping up the size in 10% increments. You will want to run an Unsharp Mask at every 30% or 1/3 of the process to get to the final desired image size.

Keep in mind that as you increase the size, it is compounding. So, when you repeat after the first time, 30% does not necessarily equal 3 times.

This process allowed me to take a 3×5 inch image to a 4×6 feet. I got the print back today, and the quality is amazing. I could have even gone larger with it.

For a while now I’ve been telling clients that search engines love blogs.  In fact, when doing research for this post most of the results from Google were blog postings.  Here’s five reasons I believe blogs provide great SEO:

1. Fresh content - If a search engine has the option of showing content created in 2002 about a topic, or a post made a few days ago, it will likely choose the new post.
2. Linking - Search Engine algorithms look at outgoing and incoming links to a site.  Since most business related sites choose not to link to other sites (the “lets keep them on our site as long as possible” mentality), they rank rather low in outgoing links.  And since they aren’t linking to others, others are less likely to link to them.
3. Keyword Rich - Blog posts are short.  Because of that, bloggers get to the point and tend to use more keywords then a jargon filled page written by a marketer and passed through multiple revision processes.  Also, blog posts are categorized and tagged adding more keywords to the content.
4. Good content - When a blogger is blogging multiple times a week, they can only say so much about the same topics before it becomes repetitive and boring: so they stretch.  They blog about how their topics are applied to other industries.  They blog about related news and information.  They blog about anything that fits into their area of expertise.  This creates new unique content that is valuable.  When someone searches for these obscure - or niche - topics, these posts float to the top.
5. RSS - Blogs have RSS feeds.  Search engines are paying more attention to RSS feeds as they provide a clear and concise version of the content without any old school SEO tricks.  An RSS feed contains the post’s date, title, full or abbreviated text, tags, enclosures and other relevant information.  They can’t be faked with a ton of keywords in the sites presentation or meta data.

There are other factors that go into search algorithms besides these and these factors alone will not a first result make.  Please feel free to add any of your own thoughts in the comments below or by emailing me at jkenzer@twelvehorses.com.

tags: SEO, Blogs, Google, Yahoo, Search Engines, RSS

If you need an easy to use tool for graphic manipulation but can’t justify the full cost for Photoshop, check out Paint.net.  You can use it to crop your photo in technorati, upload your image to TypePad (as seen on the left) or whatever else you may need to do.

The program is has many of the bells and whistles found in Photoshop but I wouldn’t recommend it to a Photoshop power user.  Instead, its great for the quick easy tasks that marketers often need to take care of themselves.

tags: Paint.net, Photoshop, Graphics, Technorati, Typepad