Typically, websites are made in a very linear fashion. There is always an entry point, which is typically a home page or landing page. This is followed by a handful of single pages, all in a very clearly set row, defined by either a horizontal, or vertical navigation bar. Simple, right?

There are certainly websites that exist in an almost organic, very dynamic fashion. These include news websites (Canoe.ca, NYTimes.com, etc.), and user-driven websites (Facebook.com, Reddit.com, etc.). Search engines have been making a shift to user-generated content for years, and not just because it’s fresh and more frequently updated, but in part because of the linking structures that are built into the website architecture.

Let’s face it, most small to medium sized businesses have what are called ‘defensive’ websites. These are websites that exist purely because they want to put the URL on their business cards. These sites are also built in the most linear, straightforward way possible. Below is a depiction of one of these websites:

On these websites there exist a handful of pages, with some content here and there. The only way to access any page on the website is always done through the navigation bar… which I HOPE are not images… but that’s for another day. This, my friends, is a typical corporate website. Go look for yourself, and you will see.

One of the most effective ways of increasing the ‘importance’ of a website is by inner linking words and phrases found within the content, to other relevant pages within the website. You might ask “Why does it matter… these aren’t as good as getting links from other websites, so why bother?”. While not as valuable as a backlink from another high traffic website, inner linking has been proven to be a very effective method of increasing search rankings. It’s also making changes to your own website which you have full control over, so why wouldn’t you do it?

It’s a very simple process, but it should be done in a way that it assists the visitor. The end result will be a more connected website with highlighted content for Google and other search engines to pinpoint for future search queries. An example of an inner-linked website can be found below:

Not only are the pages connected through the website’s navigation, but since relevant keywords have also been linked, it will create a much more connected and intertwined system, boosting the authority and importance of not just specific pages, but the website as a whole. This will, in turn, increase the likelihood of pages showing up in search engine results.

Here are some other related articles that you might find interesting:

• 10 Quick Search Engine Optimization Tips
• Think Your Website Is Too Old To Optimize? Think Again!

So, your new website is done and it’s online. Now, you just sit back and wait for visitors, right? ….Wrong! You need to get out there and promote the heck out of it, using one or many of the ever expanding number of options available. Promotion is just as important as design, development and content, combined. Can you imagine if Ford built a great new car, but decided not to tell anyone? I’m pretty sure that sales would not be too stellar.

Speaking of promotion, two of the most effective methods of promoting any website, are by building organic search (Google, Bing, etc.) and by gaining website referrals (i.e. Site B has a link to Site A). It can be just as difficult to climb the search ranks as it is to generate a new referral, but thankfully the two methods feed off of each other in many ways. So how on earth do these things called Backlinks come in?

How Do Backlinks Effect Organic Search?

Google takes hundreds of factors into consideration when they decide who ranks high on their organic search rankings, and for what keywords. Some factors carry more weight than others, including content, url structure, page load speed and of course… backlinks! Imagine if Site A and Site B feature very similar content and have been established for roughly the same amount of time. Site has 20 backlinks from smaller, relatively insignificant blogs and forum posts. Site B on the other hand, has 50 backlinks, some of them from established online news publications, and a couple of popular blogs. It doesn’t require much thought to determine that Site B will carry more weight, thus helping to boost its ranking.

Ok I Understand, But How Do I Actually Get Backlinks?

Most websites are not likely going to go out of their way to provide you with a link, unless of course you give them a reason to. Perhaps you have some great content, or perhaps you feature a niche product or service. Or perhaps you’re an industry leader and people just want to be associated with you. There’s also the tried and tested method of asking nicely! You would be surprised to see how generous many business owners, blog writers or forum posters are, if you simply ask. Often, they may ask for you to reciprocate, which depending on your type of business and website, may not be possible, but that’s up for you to decide. Regardless of the method, having links from other websites is one of the single most powerful contributing factors for determining a website’s placement within search rankings.

Some Websites Charge For Backlinks, Are They Legit?

As a general rule of thumb, if you need to pay for anything outside of your monthly SEO fees, it’s not necessary or worse, it could hurt your rankings in the long run. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t truly beneficial services out there. Website link farms have given paid backlinks a very bad name, by flooding pages with hundreds of links, rendering yours (that you could have paid $100 or more for) almost useless.

Look for websites directly dealing with your industry, that feature only a handful of highly relevant links. Also, sponsorships are a good way to drive relevant traffic (if you have the ad budget for it). These typically consist of a banner located in a static area of a website. They can be costly, but the returns can be significant especially for a brand awareness campaign.

So there you have it. Backlinks are helpful in a variety of ways, but most importantly, they ultimately help drive more targeted, relevant visitors to your website. So instead of sitting back waiting for viewers, get out there and secure those backlinks!

A common concern from business owners is that in order to climb the ever changing Google rankings, they will need to update their aging website, potentially spending tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. This may not necessarily be the case, and in fact, optimizing an existing website may be easier than you think.

While there are hundreds of factors that Google uses when determining a website’s search ranking, a lot of them are under your control. A lot of Content Management Systems (CMS) have made this process incredibly easy, sometimes even automatic, but by no means does it mean that older websites cannot be optimized. The process may require more manual adjustments, but the underlying effect can still be pushed to search engines.

Do you have access to your code?

Regardless of whether your website was developed in-house, or by another agency, you should have access to the website code, whether it’s via FTP or a control panel.  This access is critical in order to manipulate or adjust the code for Search Engine Optimization purposes.

Whether you decide to hire an SEO agency to do this work for you, or do it yourself, changes in rankings will not happen overnight. In fact, they could take weeks or even months to have a real impact. Optimizing a website however, is the first step in building a powerful online sales tool. Not only does optimizing a website help search engines effectively crawl, scan and index the pages and content contained within, but it also helps visitors and potential customers find what they need more easily. This will ultimately create more sales conversions.

Quick optimization tips

• Make sure every page has a descriptive, concise Page Title. This is what users see first when they are sorting through the hundreds of search results.
• Write informative, unique META Descriptions. These are the second part of a search result that users see when viewing search results. If you do not have a Description, you leave it up to Google to determine what it will say, which can have negative effects.
• Give all of your images ALT tags. Think about it… does prodshot126.jpg mean anything to you? No, of course not. Google sees the same thing, so renaming the image to 3-iron-golf-club.jpg instead all of a sudden gives the image value and meaning. Can’t change the name of the image? By adding an ALT tag to the image, you provide a similar value.
• Do you have links to other websites? Add this code to the links (rel=”nofollow”). Not only will the links remain, allowing your visitors access to the same valuable resources, but you will retain all page authority (the importance of the specific page in Google’s eyes).
• Content Content CONTENT! If your site is a week old or a decade old, you will always have the ability to change content. There is a gap between what makes sense to humans and what makes sense to robots. Trying to bridge that gap will pay dividends, as users will be informed with quality content, and search engines will be convinced that your website is providing content relevant to visitor search queries.

Just by implementing these few steps, your website will become much more search engine friendly. No matter how old your website is, it will still output HTML. The techniques used above are very basic, however they are also very important and powerful. Also, nothing is ever final so feel free to tweak and change content. As mentioned earlier though, be patient as organic SEO (in case you couldn’t tell, these are basic SEO tactics) can take time. Good luck!

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.

Search engines and SEO in general are changing on what seems like a daily basis. Algorithms are constantly being tweaked, and what worked like a charm 2 months ago, may be falling flat today. This presents an interesting mix of excitement and stress for most marketing companies, and I won’t lie… we are not exempt.

While I could talk all day long about what could help in the short or long term for a website’s online performance, it might be easier to list what NOT to do. We spend a lot of time researching, analyzing and scouring the web, and we’ve seen some questionable things, so here it goes…

What NOT to do with your website

• Make a site entirely comprised of Flash. Search engines don’t need to find your website.
• Rely on Javascript for all links. You should make it as hard as possible for a search engine to crawl your website.
• Ignore social media completely.  Facebook? LinkedIn? Pfft, they’re just fads.
• Stick with newspaper ads instead of a highly targeted PPC campaign. Proven results don’t mean anything.
• Keep content the same…… forever. Why do other companies waste time writing fresh content all the time?  So what if they are constantly ranking higher?
• Ignore analytics. You don’t need to know where visitors come from, or who is converting to a sales lead. That’s where those expensive newspaper ads come in handy…. right?
• If you DO end up optimizing your website, just do it once. 6 months later everything should hopefully be the same anyways.

Once the <sarcasm> HTML tag has been created, this entire list would surely be contained in it, so my apologies.  Also, sorry about the <sarcasm> joke.

Anyways, this is just scratching the service of BAD choices. It was a lot of fun to write surprisingly, so I will definitely be doing it again. In the meantime, have a look at some of our other related articles :

- SEO Rule #3 – It’s Never Too Late To Promote
- SEO Rule #2 – Focus On Website Goals
- SEO Rule #1 – Content Is King

In an ongoing Glacier-Digital blog series of SEO Rules, this week will discuss how Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing can be implemented into any site and at any time.

Many businesses are afraid to take the step into online promotion and marketing, because it is still a mystery to many of them. It’s not something you can hold in your hand like a flyer, nor is it something that takes hours to prepare, so it must not work.  Right?

This could not be further from the truth. Not only can online promotion be tracked down to an individual, but the stats and potential benefits are nearly instant. Long gone are the days of intense market research to see how your recent promotional efforts performed. Simply log in to your analytic tracking account and click View Report. It’s as easy as that. (With some setup and configuration from us of course!)

Now, let’s say you recently had your website redesigned but it’s receiving little, to no search engine traffic. Do not give up all hope by simply writing it off, in order to move onto other things. You’ve spent too much money, time and resources on that brand new website to just let it disappear. You need to promote it! This doesn’t just mean sending a newsletter and crossing your fingers that someone will email you back. This means spreading the word by any means possible, as effectively and as regularly as possible.

We won’t go into specifics, but there are an incredible number of tools available to help businesses connect with their customers. They are all available at a very small cost, while most are actually free.

There are some very quick and basic SEO tips that can be used on any website. These will help search engines detect and index a website naturally, without spending money on advertising directly.

These are some of the proven steps to increase the chances of your website reaching desired visitors.

1. Ensure your Page Title, META Description, and URLs are as descriptive and clear as possible.
2. Offer well-written, clear and concise content, relevant to the page title, description and URL.
3. Perform any necessary programming adjustments to increase page load speed, as this now effects both AdWords quality score AND regular search rankings.

Please read the previous ‘SEO Rule’ posts :

• SEO Rule #2 : Focus On Website Goals
• SEO Rule #1 : Content Is King

In an ongoing effort to continue providing you with our series of SEO Rules, we bring you Rule #2. Focusing on the goals of a website.

You must ask yourself… WHAT is the point of your website? It isn’t a question that people are asked very often. In the past, the only reason most businesses have a website is a) because they need to let people know how to contact them, or b) because their competition does, therefore they need one as well.

A question not asked very often : WHAT is the point of your website?

These are no longer valid reasons in today’s rapidly expanding and changing online environment. The purpose of ANY company website, and it really doesn’t matter which type of business, is to generate sales. Whether these sales are generated directly on the website, through email, a contact form or over the phone, they provide a market that is unmatched with any other.

The ability to reach hundreds of thousands, even millions of people at any time, is incredibly powerful. If you manage to capture even a fraction of those viewers, don’t you want to capture their attention as quickly and as effectively as possible?

Provide a Call-To-Action, CLEARLY available on EVERY page that consists of a text phrase or even an image, focusing on the main goal/purpose of your website. That goal could be a phone call, a form submission, or even a product purchase. You need to expect every visitor to be lost and confused when they stumble upon your website, so by making everything as easy as possible for them, it will result in more conversions.

This doesn’t just apply to natural search rankings, but to any advertising campaign as well. A well placed, direct and concise Call-To-Action will create a point of interest for any visitor and is essential for every website.

As we’ve mentioned many times before on this blog, before any search engine optimization is performed on a website and before any changes are made, a website’s content must be scoured with a fine toothed comb.

There are thousands upon thousands of websites that require SEO services, however, they focus on techniques to capture the attention of search engines, instead of their visitors. They will never realize the success that is possible with well written, relevant content.

First and foremost, the “human” factor is the driving force behind any website’s success. Building a website purely for search engines will never maintain any high search rankings and certainly won’t appeal to real visitors.

Determining what a website provides for its visitors is crucial, as it lays the base upon which to build.

Is it a resource or knowledge base? Is it a means of generating sales leads? Is it a way to interact with others in the similar industry?

These are just some of the possible scenarios which would require a very different approach to writing a website’s content.

Whether a copy writer is required or not, content must be informative and detailed, yet captivating enough to engage the visitor and keep them coming back for more.