We have built a successful software and web development business over the last ten years, and we’re just getting started. Become part of the great team currently taking this business to new heights. You’ll be working in a fast-paced, yet casual environment in Burlington, Ontario.

We are a fun, open, group of friends who, simply put… like making awesome stuff with computers. We work with great clients such as the CN Tower and the Burlington Performing Arts Centre, and despite having high standards, we all enjoy a relaxed, friendly atmosphere. If you enjoy a team environment and being at the forefront of web innovation we’d love to talk to you. Our office is filled with opportunities for people who want to invent the digital future. It’s a big challenge, but it’s a big Internet. We offer competitive compensation and wonderful benefits. If you think you have what it takes to contribute to the continued growth and development at Glacier please get in touch. Positions are on-site.

Position overview: .Net Programmer

We need to add proactive, energetic and skilled team members with, at least, 2+ years’ experience programming for the Internet in ASP.NET and JavaScript. Glacier Digital customers enjoy a quality of technical expertise that makes us distinctive. Candidates are expected to contribute positively to customer experience.

Specifically, we are looking for details-oriented programmers who are driven and love code. Ideal candidates will be passionate about making data beautiful, understand LINQ and will have exceptionally strong skill sets in object oriented programming, data structures and code optimization, be highly organized and understand how to translate client-approved designs into functional applications.

You must have a high level of skill with c#, client-side technologies and client-side debugging tools (Fiddler, Firebug, etc). If you don’t get out of bed for a YSlow or Pagespeed score of less than 97, we should talk.

Qualifications

• 2+ years’ experience programming in .Net.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with project managers consulting on application requirements and information architecture.
• Develop awesome CMS modules, mobile application interfaces and design solutions.
• Work with developers on the build, test and launch of websites.
• Contribute to the development of application design and functionality.
• Provide innovative solutions to client’s problems.

Skills Required

• Expertise with .Net 3.5 (c#).
• Knowledge of Windows Server 2003 (IIS6).
• Knowledge of SQL Server Express/Standard 2005.
• Expertise with JQuery 1.4.
• Expertise with Fiddler and Firebug.
• You should enjoy bending the DOM to your will, crafting rich, performance-enabled cross platform interfaces.
• Knowledge of web standards.
• Manipulate CSS/JS as if they were silly putty.
• Expertise designing modern websites and mobile applications.
• GUI design experience.
• Deep understanding of CSS (you will not be writing CSS).
• Ability to meet agreed upon deadlines.
• Marketing sense and ability to add value to strategy discussions with directors.
• Balance priorities of special projects with ongoing operations.
• Excellence communicating with project managers and staff.

Beneficial (but not required) skills and experience

• Experience working with CMS systems.
• Knowledge of .Net 4.0 (c#).
• Knowledge of Windows Server 2008 R2 (IIS7).
• Knowledge of SQL Server Express/Standard 2008.
• Knowledge of JQuery (most current).
• Knowledge of DNS Zones and records (Windows, Linux)
• Familiarity with Subversion
• Familiarity with virtual environments

Full time employees enjoy a great benefits package.
Glacier Digital is an equal opportunity employer.
This position is a full-time opportunity.

If you would like to submit your resume, please visit the official listing on Workopolis, here : http://www.workopolis.com/EN/job/13444384

It’s tough these days to find the time to spend tracking down and sifting through the thousands of websites, blogs, forums and videos available online, just to receive conflicting advice.

Well, we are enamored that you have chosen our blog as your go to guide for Search Engine Optimization tips. We don’t go wild with our theories (well, we try not to), we instead take a more conservative approach. We stick with what works. Gauging how well something works mind you, is not up to us. That’s up to the search engines and their teams of mathematicians, who toil away at their ever adapting algorithms. Which, at the end of the day, are there to help you find EXACTLY what it is you’re looking for.

Anyways, enough about us!

I really wanted to keep this blog post short and sweet, by offering up a list of 20 simple things you should be doing to help improve your website. The list may seem SEO-centric, but regardless of how it’s handled, every point is there in order to help boost traffic, increase usability and ultimately, generate more leads.

Improve Your Website, One Step At A Time

1. Your corporate website is not a blog, so why are you using WordPress?
2. Your corporate blog is not a website, so why AREN’T you using WordPress?
3. If you do have a blog, use RSS to link it up to your website.
4. If you don’t know what RSS means or what it can do, spend some time to learn.
5. Hire a designer! Your website is a representation of your business. If it looks out of date, then you are as well (at least in the eyes of a potential online customer).
6. Learn HTML… even just a little. It’s REALLY not that hard, and even if you are using a CMS, it can come in very handy.
7. If you don’t already know, find out what a CMS is. You will love them.
8. Get a contact form on your website. Don’t be too pushy though, just ask for SOME information (Name, Comments, etc.). It’s not a sales tool, it’s a lead generation tool.
9. Optimize all of the graphics. Don’t know how? Use some of the tools available online, or download Gimp (think of it as a free alternative to Photoshop).
10. Look at your website in more than one browser. We know most people still use Internet Explorer, but that number is shrinking every day. Does your site look the same in Firefox, Chrome, or on an iPad?
11. Get rid of the Flash. This is more of an opinion than a written rule, but much of the work that Flash can provide, can be done in a much more search engine friendly manner through the use of HTML, CSS and images. (Not to mention it doesn’t render at all on iOS devices).
12. Make sure your website’s goals are clear. Ask yourself why people would want to be there and what you want them to do.
13. Keep the navigation consistent. When menus and buttons jump around, visitors don’t just get lost, they get frustrated. Frustration = lost revenue.
14. Update your content, whenever you can. Chances are, even if your site is only one year old, the content hasn’t changed at all. Fresh content indicates to search engines that your site is worth crawling more than once a year.
15. Make sure you don’t have any 404 pages. Broken links or removed pages can cause errors for your visitors. Minimizing and controlling how they are handled is incredibly important.
16. Make your website mobile friendly. Mobile device usage is only going to grow, so get this done now. Ask your agency or developer what they can do.
17. Promote your social media efforts. Do you have a Facebook page, Twitter account, Youtube channel, LinkedIn Company profile? Get them on your website asap.
18. If you have a single location, prominently feature the contact information (especially the phone number) on every page. This will not only help with local based organic search, but will provide visitors with an easy way to contact you, without having to hunt for the info.
19. Update your Page Titles. Look up at the title or tab bar of your browser. Having Home – Acme Company on EVERY page doesn’t help anyone.
20. Get an SEO company to help with the really nerdy stuff like META Descriptions, Open Graph, Anchor text, rel=”nofollow” and “canonical” and all of the other stuff that doesn’t make any sense.

There are hundreds of factors taken into consideration by search engines when determining where your website will be displayed for a specific search keyword. The exact list, and importance of each factor is under a higher level of security than the pentagon (maybe?), so integrating every technique possible is the only way to ensure that your website is in the best possible position.

If you found this at all helpful, please let us know in the comments. Also, there  are some recent blog posts below that you might find informative.

• Think Your Site Is Too Old To Optimize? Think Again.
• 10 Quick Search Engine Optimization Tips
• Online Marketing : What NOT to do

Sure, everyone has seen them. Those funny URLs that don’t seem to make any sense. They show up in Twitter posts mostly, or even on your Facebook wall from time to time. Even Google and Youtube have joined the bandwagon. What I’m talking about, are shortened URLs. The way they work, is instead of using a standard (and long) URL such as http://www.glacier-digital.com/Internet-Marketing/Search-Engine-Optimization.html, shortening services can be used to get them down to a much more manageable, digestible size such as : http://bit.ly/ka1Qci. The reason they were originally created isn’t entirely clear, but (and this is just a theory) it seems awfully suspicious that they were introduced around the time Twitter began it’s quick ascent to the the upper elite of the social media realm. Short URLs feel right at home within those precious 140 characters.

Getting the URLs down to more manageable levels is all well and good, but there’s another reason that interests me a bit more. And this is definitely more up the alley of all the SEOs and SEMs out there. So I apologize if I get a bit nerdy when looking at charts like the one below.



The thing is, with URL shorteners, and depending on the service you are using the shorten them, you can track an abundant amount of data you might not have been able to before. This can include QR Codes scans, Video links, and basically any other type of URL. There is also the ability to install browser plugins, or use the service directly in management applications such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, allowing you to automatically shorten and track all links pasted into the tools.

Give it a try, as I mentioned, even Google is in on it. Shorten a link with Goo.gl

Or, if you want to stick around for a while, read some of our other relevant posts :

• 10 Quick Search Engine Optimization Tips
• Why Being #1 On Google Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be

If you’ve read online offers peddling any number of ‘enhancing’ pills, NBA swag or opportunities to purchase only the most affordable iPads online whilst perusing a forum or the comments section of a blog, then the purveyor of said website is probably in need of some measure of controling spam. The common go-to controls for such precautionary measures are called CAPTCHA, or their adorable little brother SAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA is an absurd acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart” and in its essence is a humanity test; kind of like the one administered in the 1982 movie Blade Runner, but with considerably less suspense. The hope behind CAPTCHA is to stymie a spambot by confounding it with a question or task that rudimentary bot software can’t figure out, but is still something a human with fully-functional fuzzy logic can solve easily.

The most typical implementation of CAPTCHA is through a slightly obfuscated pictorial rendering of a word, such as this disfigurement of my native language below:

I have a few issues with CAPTCHA controls and I suspect most people do as well, upon reflection. On more than one level, they’re kind of offensive. Visually, they’re ugly, and they confuse many users new to the Internet (such as my wizened parents). They rely primarily on visual perception, so people with disabilities are dependent upon developers implementing the responsible version of the CAPTCHA control (such as the Internet’s most popular CAPTCHA tool: reCAPTCHA).

So. Is there a requirement for CAPTCHA or CAPTCHA-like controls on a website at all? Think about this for a moment.

• People hate CAPTCHAs
• Bots hate CAPTCHAs (they’re irrefutably effective…for a while)
• They add another layer of frustration between “spam intention” and the successful “delivery of spam”
• They ruin the design of a page and are a general annoyance for all involved

So when, if ever, does one actually use a CAPTCHA control?

Here’s my best answer:

You use them in a “lesser of two evils” kind of way…and every conditional point here is a potential deal breaker, if it doesn’t check out:

Implement CAPTCHA in any instance where: the number of users on your site, who you may potentially lose because they are offended by spam, is greater than the number of conversions (where conversion is measured as the accepting of user-based website content contribution(value)) your site stands to lose due to CAPTCHAs road-blocking said ease of content contribution delivery.

Or in a less wordy way: use CAPTCHAs on user creation forms or in public forums and then ONLY when that forum allows anonymous posting. Otherwise don’t. You are not a focused target for spammers.

If you roll a CAPTCHA onto a site for any other reason you are potentially limiting conversions and weakening your ROI. Period.

Do not use CAPTCHA on:

• Login forms
• Email forms, where the email is delivered to a single business representative (i.e. NOT a mailing list)
• Authenticated user accounts
• When you have a moderator vetting value from trash before content is published to a user base.

My main point here is that CAPTCHAs have very limited applications to begin with.

But it gets worse.

Despite their limited practical application, CAPTCHAs are less and less viable with each passing day. Since, theoretically, CAPTCHAs are only routinely beaten by a human, all spammers need do to subvert the system is apply an abundance of (presumably affordable) human brainpower. Enter India.

A 10-second Google search will reveal “DeCaptcher” and “Death by Captcha”, which offers an army of human CAPTCHA solvers to you for as little as $1.39-$2.00 USD per 1000 CAPTCHAs, with typical response times in fewer than 30 seconds. For “numbers people” these services also offer reporting on failures, redeemable for credit; however, success rates are typically so high that most do not bother with this, erm…courtesies.

These services work really well with the most common types of CAPTCHA on the Internet, namely reCAPTCHA (remember them?), with slightly lower success rates on some more difficult CAPTCHA styles such as the kind used on the Wikimedia sites.

See where this is going?

I look at the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs as akin to Steve Jobs’ recent denunciation of MobileMe (to be superseded by iCloud). It’s an inevitable replacement to a languishing predecessor. CAPTCHAs had their time when most spam was being blocked successfully; there was a short period where we tolerated the inconvenience and CAPTCHAs enjoyed a bloom of adoption. Then the global economy kicked in and it became affordable for humans and bots to work together in relative harmony whilst spamming the planet: a marriage, of sorts, between the application of human intellect and the toilings of a looping subroutine…each fulfilling their collaborative role to annoy the world.

Whether your website provides your distributor or clients with password protected materials, or is available for the entire world to see and access, the process of website optimization and usability testing is equally as important.

Some businesses may have a website dedicated to each individual purpose, perhaps for privacy or security reasons, or perhaps one was created after the other. Whatever the case is, ensuring public facing pages are optimized for both their visitors and for search engines is a no-brainer. Is this the case for sites intended for a very small, specific audience? Of course!

Programmers have a knack of being great at one thing, and that’s programming.  They aren’t, let’s say… the best when it comes to visual design, or usability (I’m anticipating a few smacks to the back of the head right about now). Ask them to code anything and they will, and chances are it will work exactly as it should. However, ask a client to use the application without applying any usability testing or optimization, and you’re in for a world of hurt.

you will be handed a project from a team of programmers, with colours you thought only existed in a wardrobe from the 1970′s

There’s a reason quality assurance can quite often become the largest consumer of man hours on a project. The more complex a project is, the more time will be required to ensure it works as advertised and that any concerns are wiped away.

Quite often, you will be handed a project from a team of programmers, with colours you thought only existed in a wardrobe from the 1970′s, as well as cramped spacing, along with nothing but text, text and more text. Hand this over to a client and expect them to raise an eyebrow, or two. This is where optimization and usability testing come into play.

By performing a complete walk-through of the application, necessary changes can then be made to its style, look and feel. Any occurrences of cumbersome, confusing or navigation, content or section layouts are also rectified, allowing for an easier user experience.

You’ve optimized your public-facing website for your visitors, right? Well, I hate to break it to you, but your private intranet or secured website is being used by humans as well, and should be developed with that in mind.

This process is no different than traditional SEO, only with a more limited audience in mind.

If you’ve ever created your own website, viewed another website’s source code or talked to anyone in the industry, you’ve no doubt heard the term ‘META tag’ thrown around.

Depending on who you talk to, you will discover that the use and importance of META data has dropped considerably over the past 5 years or so.

Web technologies have advanced so much over the years, that many of the previously used META tags have become either redundant, irrelevant, or are simply ignored by search engines.

Does this mean you should forget about them completely? Not at all. I will talk about the 2 most commonly used META tags, Descriptions and Keywords.

META “Description”
The Description tag is actually very important and is still widely used. It will have almost no impact on your rankings, however it will vastly improve the appearance of your website when showing up in search results.

As you will notice below, Google is pulling content from a META Description tag located on www.glacier-digital.com. If a Description tag was not specified, it would simply pull the first content it could find. This method can be sufficient for some websites, however leaving any task solely up to search engines is never a good idea.

It is important to include the most detailed information in the first 2 sentences, as most search engines will only display the first 150-200 characters.

META “Keywords”
META Keywords were incredibly popular in the late 1990′s, however with that popularity came exploitation. Webmasters would stuff META keywords into their website, even if they were unrelated to the content. Slowly, but surely, search engines began ignoring or banning META keywords from their algorithms completely.

Presently, no one is 100% certain if all search engines have excluded META keywords from their search algorithms. Yahoo apparently still uses them, in conjunction with other factors in order to rank their search results.

Determining a short list of 10 to 12 keywords or phrases, relevant to the content on the specified page, would be the best course of action. Search engines change their search algorithms frequently and adhering to all rules, whether or not they are 100% effective, is never a bad idea.

There is an assortment of other META tags that are available, however it is up to you and your SEO provider to determine which ones will be applicable for your website.