Our team of three senior staff are really looking forward to some of the exceptional chats and panels setup for this year, including three distinctive tracks for bloggers/community, designers, and developers.

Some extra special highlights on our roster for tomorrow include:

• Responsive Typography for WordPress Themes
• SEO in WordPress
• Taking Backgrounds to the Next Level
• WordPress Coding Done Right: 3 Lightning Talks
• Caching in WordPress
• Write or Die

We can’t wait to share with you what we’ve learned! Follow us at @bwdinc all day!

Cutts’ video details somewhat exactly what SEOs (or search engine optimizers) should be expecting in the coming year from the search engine giant. Needless to say, this video provides some valuable insight as to where this industry is headed, the potential ramifications, and some greatly awaited benefits for small to medium sized businesses.

Along with this analysis of the video, this guide will also discuss the major aspects of SEO pre-2012 vs. 2013 for small to medium sized businesses, why pre-2012 SEO is dead, and future expectations for the industry from our SEO experts. And as always, feel free to email our team if you have any questions. 

Image courtesy Google.

While major algorithm updates from Google (such as Panda 1.0 in February 2011 and Penguin in April 2012) have become the ire of a vast gang of digital marketers who employ cheaply created content and SPAM, we at BWD have never been more excited for the changes coming with Panda 2.0. This feeling is founded in the fact that our clients have understood the need for high quality content and creative digital network building as a means to SEO, and that these latest changes will only further pay off their great work.

Why Pre-2012 SEO is Dead

Google’s Panda update in February 2011 ate up cruddy search results faster than this real life pand could eat her bamboo.

Prior to the latest major hit to Google’s search results with Panda 1.0 and Penguin, inbound links–the gold standard in driving up one’s rankings in search engine results pages–were available cheaply and in great volume. A few snippets inserted into your website, a batch of 100 links purchased from a Chinese link building farm, and boom, many businesses were set. Low-end firms out of the Middle East, China, and other under developed countries would produce these batches for pennies with just a minimum amount of creativity and strategy baked in and certainly no employee benefits to be heard of. Whoever managed to reign supreme in purchasing masses of links, won on search engine results pages. Thus, big boy brands with plenty to spend saw their pages rise “artificially”–as was the case with the JC Penney SEO debacle in 2011–and the little guys continued to remain stuck in a mud of linkless purgatory, many pages down no matter how helpful their content would have been to a searcher.

Panda and Penguin changed this all, and in April 2012, the SEO landscape became decidedly must stricter for good. While many marketers cried that entire online businesses were ruined, and massive budgets now became meaningless, Google forged on in explaining that their mission was only ever to provide the most high quality, relevant pages possible, and to get spam out, of course staying relatively tight lipped as to how those provisions actually worked.

At this point, the cheap link building tactics via tireless foreign outsource teams have been over for quite some time, and gone with them, any notion of SEO framed around April 2012 practices or prior.

What the term “SEO” means in 2013 and onwards

Matt’s latest video is just one of the many pieces of evidence supporting our belief that Google is headed in a long term direction in ensuring “paid SEO link building” stays in the past. Instead, Google continually notes that website owners should be creating real, organic connections with other websites, building social capital thanks to excellent content, and producing more and more content that is just so great, it just has to be shared.

In this way, paid SEO companies, agencies, or consultants should only ever be working to achieve these ideals, and as one may suspect, the price of outsourcing real SEO to a third party has increased somewhat due to the skill required to create these connections. However, there’s a greater chance than ever for small and medium sized businesses to achieve these tasks cheaply and effectively in house if needed, and well within a responsible monthly budget if they cannot spare the resources. Otherwise, larger small businesses and medium sized businesses should actively be auditing their SEO’s work, or consider moving forward with an agency of a higher caliber.

Low Cost In House Solutions for Very Small Businesses

The added–and arguably more important–benefit of Penguin 2.0 is that the process of high quality, organic link building through creative digital networking is now more easily possible for the average website owner to maintain, given an expertly crafted content platform–like WordPress–from which to do so.  While the actual process of creating the platform and initial copy strategy needed for an explosively impactful front page (for example) should still be left to a professional, all other SEO opportunities now lie in the hands of anyone with a creative mind, enough time, and an interest in producing content to share with a friendly, responsive network of others. In addition, there are increasingly few–if any–rigid guidelines to follow as they create that content, expect the natural inclusion of keywords relevant to their products and services such as locations, brand names, and basic product/service keywords or parameters.

Our Key Takeaways from Matt’s Video and Google’s Message

Check it out for yourself, and review our comments below:

Make a great site: We love this quote thanks to its true simplicity:

“Make a great site, that users love, that they’ll want to tell their friends about, book mark, come back to, visit over and over again. You know, all the things that make a site compelling. We try to make sure that if that’s you’re goal, we’re aligned with that goal [and will show users your site.]“

Matt further reassures websites–like our client’s–that have long stayed away from cheap tactics that,”If you’re doing high quality content whenever you’re doing SEO, this shouldn’t be a big surprise. You shouldn’t have to worry about a lot of different changes. If you’ve been hanging out on a lot of black hat forums [then you'll have problems.]”

Penguin 2.0 will be super thorough: Penguin 2.0 will only be more deeply rooting out the cheap tactics from pre-2012. Given the whirlwind reaction we had with Penguin 1.0 and Panda, many big brands and “cheaters” may be reeling even further in a few months when Panda 2.0 is released.

Traditionally, advertorials were found in newspapers or magazines as advertisements meant to blend in as editorials. These days in the digital world, it’s important that you clearly mark this paid type of advertising content as an ad, to ensure that 1. Google doesn’t penalize you for tricking visitors, and 2. to make sure that Google doesn’t carry any page rank or value over to the links in the advertorial. As Google reassures, digital advertorials are OK and a great way for digital publishers to make money, but they must be clearly marked. Check out Matt’s video on the topic of advertorials and search here.

Paid advertisements will be more easily found and penalized only if they’ve used with trickery to promote clicks: Penguin 2.0 will more clearly identify paid advertisements–of course through secret, properietary means–ensuring that no clicks pass on page rank or SEO value to the end website. Clear and conspicuous notices must to be included for advertorial type pieces of content–which Matt reassures us are absolutely OK–but these should never float page rank or value either. View another great video from Matt on advertorials and native editorial on YouTube here. 

Penguin 2.0 will be more sophisticated than ever: The parts of the algorithim that focus on link analysis are becoming increasingly more sophisticated. While Matt is murky on the details here, we can only imagine this means more benefits for the little guy with great value in his or her company that shines through content marketing, and less for the giants who intend to do things cheaply and without much creativity at all.

More exposure to smaller, lesser known authority sources: Matt explains that Penguin 2.0 will focus a part of its energy on making those who are great authorities in a specific field more searchable and findable. Although the details on this angle are intentionally amorphous, we anticipate Cutt’s statements to mean that websites who are consistently publishing quality, organic content–through the king form of digital marketing these days: content marketing–will see even greater returns in the coming months.

Clusters of repeat results will be cleaned: As a searcher, have you ever become frustrated with search engine results pages (SERPs) just inundated with blank pages from the same source with little to no valuable content, but “pretending” to be valuable thanks to tricky keyword placement? Good news: these guys will be scrubbed out–whether they’re huge or small–in favor of more distinct, meaningful results.

Benefits for small and medium sized businesses will be palpable:  Thankfully, Matt couldn’t have said it any clearer:

“We have a lot of changes queued up that will help small to medium sized businesses and regular web masters as well [with SEO.]“

Penguin 2.0 timeline is end of summer 2013: And as Matt says, ”I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.” We agree!

Old School “SEO” is scummy

Update: Legendary leader in the SEO space, SEOmoz has completely rebranded to simply “Moz” as of last night. A major industry shift, indeed. 

Thanks to these recent and large upsets in the industry, many individuals, such as leading search engine expert and CEO/Founder of SEOmoz Moz Rand Fishkin state that they would really like to rebrand the idea of “SEO” all together:

“What we’d really like to do and what we’ve been working hard at as an industry is to try to change and broaden the definition of SEO. I can tell you one of the things that I feel very passionately about is changing that branding and working really hard to not have the word “SEO” be associated with scumminess and bad companies and irresponsible behavior. But that perception of SEO is so hard to change. It’s been established for such a long time now, and the small efforts of quite a few of us in the field to try and change that perception have not been successful, at least not outside of the online marketing world. Inside that world and with a small portion of the developers and designers who get SEO and get marketing, it’s true.”

Fellow leading SEO authority Oliver Carding also adds:

There’s a movement happening in our industry, and many folks are changing their practices and titles from “SEO” to “online marketing, inbound marketing, and/or earned media marketing.” Where did this shift originate from, and where is it taking our industry as a whole? Is it enough to just be an SEO in today’s game, or are we missing the bigger picture?

Here’s an example of one of the dozen super low-quality SEO solicitations BWD and our clients receive every day. Avoid these messages at all costs.

So what is SEO in 2013? 2014? 2015?

The future of SEO is everything.

It’s the way you build your business, and build your products. It’s diversity and creativity. It’s the way you build relationships with small bloggers and major digital publications alike, and the way you also share high quality representations of your products and services on an ever adapting set of social services. It’s the kind of content you produce, and the way in which you are able to create an “elixer” in your content style that makes viewers wanting to come back for more and more, especially with their friends. It’s about making it clear that your business is an absolute authority in the industry, through publication of case studies, internal reviews, client interviews, and much more. It’s about connecting with the brands that you mention in your content through social networks, and letting them know that you’re talking about them, too.

While page structure, keyword placement, etc… will continue to play an important role, what’s more essential is a continual network of creatively and organically sourced inbound links thanks to a wide network.

And finally: it’s about building a company that is valuable, and making sure as many individuals as possible know it, too.

Think our agency, BWD, might be up to the task of helping your small or medium business achieve these goals? Give us a shout and say hi. 

After surveying a number of content access systems supporting a paid subscription model, we settled on a service called Tinypass. Tinypass has gathered a great amount of fantastic press most recently when prolific blogger Andrew Sullivan and our friends over at BKLYNR made the switch to start charging for their high quality content–and seeing great results, with some in the six-figure range!–as well.

It’s no secret that we’re the ultimate fans of WordPress as a CMS, so when we saw the company’s great WordPress support, we knew that Tinypass would be a perfect fit for our client. Ultimately, Tinypass provides a slick and streamlined solution for sites looking to charge for their content, whether it be on a one-time, per-article basis or for entire site access at a monthly cost, even with options for a free trial month and more.

Below is a great tutorial from our lead developer Chase Wiseman on what you’ll need for an advanced, custom integration of WordPress and Tinypass. Check out our blog again soon for our further findings on the Tinypass platform from a marketing and product perspective as well.

Tutorial: What You’ll Need for a Custom WordPress/Tinypass Integration

Here I’ll detail some of the steps I took in order to have WordPress and Tinypass play nicely. If you are only wanting to get Tinypass up and running on your blog quickly, then I recommend that you consider using the official Tinypass WordPress plugin. The plugin has plenty of options and should meet the needs of most standard blogs.

While their plugin is suitable in a lot of cases, there are a few distinct areas where it falls short:

• There doesn’t seem to be out of the box support for custom post types or pages.
• Lack of styling customization – You can’t alter the look and feel of the interface too much here.

Head over to their setup tutorial to determine if the plugin has what it takes to meet your needs.

Alright, so from here on I’ll give some general tips and functions for custom Tinypass integration. This article makes a few assumptions:

1. You are very familiar and comfortable with WordPress plugin and theme development.
2. You can take these ideas and bend them to your own needs. This is not a “copy, paste, and save” tutorial.
3. You already have a registered Tinypass account and have an app ID already set up.

With that in mind, let’s roll.

The Scenario

Let’s say you have a site with a variety of content ranging from blog posts, pages, and a custom content type. You’d like all visitors to have access to general information, but would like to offer paid monthly access to most of the site.

First Steps

I recommend reading Tinypass’ API basics first to familiarize yourself with their terminology and how their subscription model works. Check it out here: http://developer.tinypass.com/main/index

In general, I find it best to create features like these with custom WordPress plugins rather than in the theme itself. The below code can be adapted to apply to either situation.

Right off the bat we’ll need to include the Tinypass SDK that will give us some nice built-in functionality. You can grab the PHP library here: http://developer.tinypass.com/downloads

Place the downloaded SDK in its own folder, include the main file, and define a few variables, like so:

// Include the SDK loader.
include_once 'path/to/sdk/TinyPass.php';

TinyPass::$SANDBOX     = false;
TinyPass::$AID         = 'your_app_id';
TinyPass::$PRIVATE_KEY = 'your_private_key';

This will tell the SDK which account to talk to when making requests. If you’re using a sandbox account then will obviously want to set TinyPass::$SANDBOX to true. Make sure to replace the $AID and $PRIVATE_KEY placeholders will the actual keys from your Tinypass dashboard.

Next, you will want to use the SDK to render a signup button for your viewers to click. Check out this example function:

function my_tinypass_button() {

    $rid = 'Premium-Content';

    $resource = new TPResource( $rid, 'Site wide premium content access' );

    $subscription_option1 = new TPPriceOption( '[0 | 30 days | 1] [2 | monthly | *]' );

    $offer = new TPOffer( $resource, array( $subscription_option1 ) );

    $request = new TPPurchaseRequest( $offer );

    return $request->generateTag();
}

This will generate a default Tinypass button which triggers a popup, allowing visitors to signup and pay for the subscription. There are plenty of customization options here, but the important bits are the $rid and $subscription_option1. The $rid stands for Resource ID and is the way Tinypass keeps track of subscriptions and the content they grand access to. Make sure this ID is consistent across all of the functions we’ll be defining in the future. $subscription_option1 uses the SDK’s TPPriceOption class to tell Tinypass what type of subscription to apply. In this case, it will be a $2/month with a 30 day free trial period. There are plenty of possibilities here, so check out the documentation for the syntax used by this class.

Next, we’ll want an easy way to determine if the current visitor has actually paid for the subscription. This is an example of a function that would do just that:

function my_tinypass_is_subscribed() {

    $rid = 'Premium-Content';
    $store = new TPAccessTokenStore();

    $store->loadTokensFromCookie( $_COOKIE );

    $token = $store->getAccessToken( $rid );

    if ( $token->isAccessGranted() )
        return true;
    else
        return false;
}

This will check the visitor’s cookies and if they have access, will return true. If the $rid for your content is not found, it will return false. Again, note the $rid. It must match the rid that we defined when generating the signup button in the previous function.

This new my_tinypass_is_subscribed() function can be used anywhere to decide how to render the page for subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

WordPress, ahoy!

Now that we have those important building blocks, we can start applying them throughout your WordPress site. There are endless options to how we can restrict and alter the content of the site here.

Let’s say we have a post type called Member Special and we only want to grant paid subscribers access to these items. We want the title and meta data of these posts to be visible to anyone, but we want the meat of the articles to be hidden. We can use WordPress’ the_content filter to accomplish this:

function my_tinypass_member_special_content( $content ) {

    // If a subscriber, let 'em through!
    if ( my_tinypass_is_subscribed() )
        return $content;

    if ( is_post_type_archive( 'member-special') || is_singular( 'member-special') )
        return 'Uh-oh! You must subscribe to view this post. Sign up or login below! <div class="tinypass_button>' . my_tinypass_button() . '</div>';
    else
        return $content;
}

This function first checks if we’re logged in to a paying Tinypass account. If we’re viewing either the post type archive for the member-special post type or a single member-special post, the content will be hidden and it will show a nice message and the Tinypass subscribe button instead. Otherwise, the post’s content will show as expected.

Let’s try another example. What if our site’s header has a big call to action button that says “Sign Up Now!” This will help bring in new subscribers, but the folks that have already subscribed certainly don’t need to see it! Something like this in your header.php template might do the trick:

<header>
    <!-- ...all of your other header info -->

    <?php if ( ! my_tinypass_is_subscribed() ) : ?>
        <a href="/signup">Sign Up Now!</a>
    <?php endif; ?>

</header><!-- .site-header -->

Hopefully you can see from these few examples how quick and easy restricting and altering content can be based on some quick Tinypass helper functions. While Tinypass’ official plugin might do the trick in some cases, there are plenty of scenarios where deeper integration is required.

Button Customization

You may have noticed by now that the default button that Tinypass generates leaves a bit to be desired. The blue ticket graphic might work for some designs, but it is by no means one size fits all. I’ve found that this is the Tinypass API’s one major shortcoming. They don’t seem to offer an easy, non-hacky way to generate a completely custom signup button. It’s not necessarily a show-stopper, but hopefully they can find a way to make this easier in the future. For now, we can use some jQuery trickery to have a fully customized experience.

Consider this: we want to have multiple “Signup” buttons throughout the site, all of which we want to trigger the default Tinypass popup to start the process. Rather than using the my_tinypass_button() function in every spot, thus rendering that bulky blue ticket graphic over and over, let’s only print that button once, hide it, and have all other “Signup” links point to it.

Simply place that template tag somewhere before the <?php wp_footer() ?> and </body> tags, and wrap it in a hidden div, like so:

    <!-- ...the rest of your site up here... -->

    <div style="display:none"><?php echo my_tinypass_button(); ?></div>

    <?php wp_footer(); ?>

    </body>

</html>

That gives us way into the Tinypass world but hides it from view, allowing us to use our own buttons and styling. But what good is that thing if no one can see it? We then use a bit of jQuery to trigger that button:

// When a "Subscribe" link is clicked
jQuery( '.tinypass-subscribe' ).on( 'click', function( e ) {

    e.preventDefault();

    jQuery( '.hidden-tinypass-button img' ).click();

} );

// When a "Login" link is clicked
jQuery( '.tinypass-login' ).on( 'click', function( e ) {

    e.preventDefault();

    jQuery( '.hidden-tinypass-button .tp_login_click' ).click();

} );

So when any element that has the .tinypass-subscribe class is clicked, the hidden Tinypass button in the footer will be “clicked” and the popup will trigger as it should. Similarly, if there are any elements with the .tinypass-login class, a popup will trigger allowing subscribers to login to their existing accounts.

This opens up endless possibilities for allowing custom and complex site designs to have the subscription features of Tinypass while keeping site’s brand consistent to the end user.

Conclusions

With these basic building blocks and concepts, harnessing the power of Tinypass within the framework of WordPress should be less of a daunting task. I encourage you to read through the rest of the Tinypass documentation as there is plenty of good info and I can’t cover it all here. I look forward to seeing what Tinypass has in store for all of us and future of content subscription.

Cosper’s stance couldn’t be clearer on the subject:

It’s time to clear up the debate once and for all. Despite all the doubts (and some haters), WordPress core is without a doubt one of the most secure platforms you can choose to put a site on.

We couldn’t agree more. Recently stories about a large botnet attacking WordPress website with “brute force” techniques took hold of the developers news cycle. We even sent out a major email blast to our clients ensuring that none of their passwords had been changed from their original, complex forms that our teams had set.

However, this sensationalist news cycle failed to finally note that sites where owners had set strong passwords, were running the latest version of WordPress core, and were vigilant about security remained untouched.

Read Cosper’s excellent article for a full analysis at WP Engine here →

UPDATE from WordPress founder, Matt Mullenwag:

Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem. Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours).

Thankfully, if you’ve worked with BWD recently and have not changed your passwords from their secure and very difficult formats set by our team, you can be confident that your system will remain unharmed. However, if you have setup new passwords, or maintain user accounts with administrative privileges that you may have forgotten about, your entire website could be at risk. Please contact us immediately if you feel this may be the case. 

Despite this attack, WordPress continues to be one of the most secure content management systems (CMSs) available to businesses and consumers today, given sensible password security and basic updating. The websites MOST at risk for this attack are those with poor passwords, or those that have been neglected for a year or more. 

As major technology news outlet Ars Technica noted last night, this 90,000 IP distributed attack “could spawn a never-before-seen super botnet.”

At least one company warned that the attackers may be in the process of building a “botnet” of infected computers that’s vastly stronger and more destructive than those available today. That’s because the servers have bandwidth connections that are typically tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times faster than botnets made of infected machines in homes and small businesses.

WordPress.com and all types of web hosts have sent out warning emails to their clients nothing these vulnerabilities and the need to take action immediately if you feel your system may have been compromised. In addition, you may be especially at risk if your WordPress website is located on Host Gator:

… the distributed attacks are attempting to brute force the administrative portals of WordPress servers, employing the username “admin” and 1,000 or so common passwords. [...]

“At this moment, we highly recommend you log into any WordPress installation you have and change the password to something that meets the security requirements specified on the WordPress website [...] “These requirements are fairly typical of a secure password: upper and lowercase letters, at least eight characters long, and including ‘special’ characters (^%$#@*).”

BWD clients will also note the chapter included in each of user manuals noting the need for secure passwords for any type of digital service, WordPress related or not.

Enormous resource strains on websites across the Internet

This massive attack has been causing a major strain on other websites unaffected by these WordPress-specific “break ins” but located on similar servers strained by the load these distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks pose. We’ve been noticing this strain on clients’ websites who are successfully standing up against the attacks, but are seeing their computing resources remain heavily affected.

With so much at stake, readers who run WordPress sites are strongly advised to lock down their servers immediately. The effort may not only protect the security of the individual site. It could help safeguard the Internet as a whole.

Using a service like VaultPress for ultimate website security

In addition to using highly secure passwords with no personal connections or discernible patterns, nearly 100% of BWD clients maintain further security and peace of mind thanks to the services of VaultPress, “The world’s best WordPress security, backup, and support.” VaultPress ensures that every bit of your content is backed up in realtime, that seucrity scans are performed daily, and that restores of your website are completely automatic any time you need them.

It’s also absolutely essential that you keep your WordPress plugins and versions as up to date as possible, because older versions of website software and even your Internet browser may harbor loop holes that hackers will take no hesitation in exploiting.

The most important take away from this post: maintain highly secure passwords, always update your software, and consider a solution like VaultPress for ultimate peace of mind.

Unsure of your website’s security or vulnerability? Contact us immediately to setup VaultPress, and perform a security audit asap. 

Good content, however, gives something back to the user. It gets them thinking about a topic that’s meaningful to them, leading them to realize how your product or services fits into their (or their business’) life or goals. Unsurprisingly, this is the only way to market brands, products, and services successfully on the internet in 2013, and especially for SEO. High quality content naturally gathers a great number of inbound links to a website as we’ve noted before, therefor driving up perceived value, referral traffic, and search engine rankings.

So instead of thinking about simply advertising your small business and making a small business internet marketing mistake, here are some tips on how to start sharing it and taking advantage of the new social web instead. Given a few hours of work each week, this form of marketing is often cheaper and more rewarding than traditional, flat advertising methods.

Have any questions? Feel free to reach out to us for individual strategy and more.

Tip 1: Network and build social capital through social media

Networking with the social web means “community strategy,” and it often ends up looking a lot like a digital web or constellaton.

People trust recommendations, and they trust them even more from individuals with high levels of social network influence. There are many glittering stars out there in the social media constellations, and when you produce content that they’re excited to share, they’ll drive a geometrically expanded number of users to your business. We generally call this process community building when one or more social networks are used.

These influential people aren’t necessarily looking for discounts as a reward; what motivates them is insider-status and getting to a great product or company “first.” While networking with these types of individuals and organizations may seem tricky at first, remain confident in the fact that if your business, products, or services are of the highest value, then your content will certainly follow through in demonstrating this to taste makers and social movers on the internet. Maintain reach outs by actively tagging your content, and using productivity tools to keep your finger on the pulse of their current conversations.

While these types of digital connections may be more obvious in some industries rather than others–for example a small local bakery vs. a mid-sized financial wealth firm–we’re happy to help you guide you and your business to the exact strategy you need to reach them. The results will not only affect your inbound traffic levels, but SEO as well.

Tip 2: Let users bring the campaign alive on social networks

Allrecipes features promotions to like their recipes on Pinterest throughout their website. Check out our Pinterest techniques for business growth here.

Social tools can produce not only fun and exciting, but highly profitable marketing campaigns where users can decide which products will be discounted, or which special offers your company may provide. For example, create an opportunity for them to vote on their favorite product via Instagram hashtags. Announce a contest for naming rights to something through a Pinterest contest. Competitions and polls will engage users and give them a chance to express themselves through the lens of your particular brand.

Curious about the former success of these types of campaigns? Allrecipes produced a Pinterest contest so popular that it produced 139 million impressions on Pinterest through 50,000 pinned recipes, boosting inbound traffic from the website 900%.

Step 3: Work altruism into the internet marketing equation

If there’s one way to add energy to social media campaigns, it’s by allowing users to do something good for the world. When being altruistic connects someone with a product they’ll enjoy buying, it’s an ideal combination as they’ll naturally want to share this kind of opportunity with friends.

Kohl’s Department Store created one of Facebook’s all-time best campaigns by allowing users to pick 20 schools which would each receive $500,000. Even when you translate this campaign to a much smaller scale, you can see the potential for this lively blend of altruism and competition.

Have any questions? Feel free to reach out to us for individual strategy for your business, and we’ll get you paired up with a member of our team shortly.

All too often our team receives forwarded emails from our clients from SEO “snake oil salesmen” offering guarantees to appear in the top three positions for a search term for an unreasonably strange sum. They’ll try to convince website owners that their websites aren’t properly optimized, and that the only way to succeed is by working with their company.

Not only are these statements almost always untrue, but these types of scammers only help to further muddle the truth about what makes “great” SEO, a complex process that we’ve discussed at length here on our blog. Here are four ways to avoid falling prey to the SEO trap as a small business owner or manager.

1. Realize the SEO frontier is just like the old wild west

Unfortunately, the world of online marketing is still in a formative, wild west era where anyone who throws up a banner can present themselves as an SEO expert. Without any sort of accreditation or accountability, unskilled and unscrupulous SEO “professionals” throng the marketplace–much like the miracle cures and soothing syrups used to stake out street corners in early American frontier towns.

While major players in the world of SEO have been actively trying to pursue a set of industry standards, best practices, and accountability, these individuals continue to take advantage of those who aren’t consistently vigilante and constantly in tune with the latest developments in the industry.

2. Recognize mediocre SEO practices immediately

In many cases, small businesses pay out tens of thousands of dollars for search engine optimization, with little comparative impact against what the organic results by the business by their own content marketing would have been anyways. SEO knowledge goes out of date rapidly, and a mediocre SEO practitioner may use obsolete gimmicks such as keyword metatags which no longer bear any weight in SEO, and repetitive content, a practice that actually can do harm to your search engine standing.

Your link building and internet marketing efforts should be part of a vast and diverse web, because it’s the only path to great SEO. Read our introductory “course” to link building–the only way to SEO in 2013– to gather a quick and thorough understanding now.

3. Understand the danger of unscrupulous SEO “experts” who think they can outwit Google

Even worse than the vaguely incompetent are the would-be wizards. Combining self-importance with the quest for quick money, they boast their unique insider’s ability to outwit the search algorithms. With no frame of reference, a small business may fall for this type of sales pitch, only to suffer drastic consequences a few weeks after the  SEO “expert” has cashed their check and headed for the hills.

What kind of consequences? Google is continuously improving its ability to detect manipulative SEO practices (such as stuffing keywords into invisible parts of the website and “cloaking,” producing different page results for search engines and human visitors). Once these bad practices are recognized, Google will quietly impose penalties on a business, and suddenly the company’s website may find that it has dropped to the 50th page of search eresults. If the violations are bad enough, Google may even remove the site’s listing altogether.

4. Recognize good SEO and run with it

In the absence of any kind of external accreditation, businesses have to learn what to listen for when they seek help with optimizing their site. If you start to hear your SEO consultant talking about “fooling” Google, you know that you’ve got the wrong person. Look instead for someone who talks about fresh, original content and who has an interest in learning about the needs of your customers to produce excellent content marketing and link building, the only way to SEO in 2013. While there are some structural “best practices,” having mostly to do with clean code and unique tags, the main way to rise in page rankings is with honest quality. No shortcuts, no tricks, no secrets.

Do you think BWD might make the cut? Let us start working some strategy with you and your business immediately. There’s no cost for a consultation.

A look into “How Search Works” by Google. Image courtesy Google.

Last week were able to take a stroll through Google’s graphic tutorial “How Search Works,” a part of the very recently revamped Inside Search part of the Google website. By the time you reach the end of that interactive pathway, you’ll find that you’ve learned a lot and that the once seemingly complicated concept of algorithms and search is now much more easy to understand. We think this is a great addition to the industry, especially in terms of increasing transparency for small businesses, and here are a few of our favorite parts:

Content: the basic element of Google SEO

In Google’s explainer, the first element they mention is content. When Google web crawlers–and any other search engine’s–sort through pages, they have algorithms that look for the highest quality content. While the idea of high quality content can seem subjective, we’ve been able to nail down some pretty good indicators over the past 12 months since the major introduction of these latest algorithms. SEO is content-based the way physical life is carbon-based: content is the fundamental building block of the online world, and without it, you’re digital marketing is sure to go nowhere.

PageRank is only one small SEO factor

Do you keep telling yourself that SEO is all about what your Google PageRank is? In Part 2 of the tutorial, we’re walked through some of the criteria that Google uses to rank websites, and the first algorithmic aspect they mention is PageRank. (This is named after Larry Page, one of the Google co-founders, by the way: a bit of internet trivia!) One basic building block for determining PageRank is inbound links. You can think of high quality inbound links as votes of confidence in your site. However, Google insists the truth is that your online marketing will go much farther if you don’t get too compulsive about PageRank, and instead just produce content that will delight your users to produce inbound links “naturally.”

SEO depends on freshness

Once again, this mention of freshness brings us back to the crucial business of blogging. By having a blog or a section with a constant flow of new content on your website, you’ll provide search engine crawlers with reason to notice your website’s domain again and again. Search algorithms are specially written so that fresh results rank higher than “stale” ones, and Google continues to improve its crawlers’ ability to distinguish fresh from stale. For example, a post from a year ago that is still valuable and actively viewed and commented upon will even be rated much better than a junk “filler” post written 3 months ago with no interest or social “movement.” This is where high quality can really show through for search engines.

Adding content on social media pages or providing tools on your website to easily share content socially–a mandatory aspect for each one of our projects–will naturally encourage people to share, and they’ll do your work for you as they generate links which get shared, retweeted, “liked,” and so on. Google’s crawlers look for new conversations, and you can get those started by adding great content to your blog.

Beware of SEO experts peddling spam

In its  exploration of spam in part 3, Google reminds us that its crawlers know how to recognize bad practices, such as link-buying, copied content, keyword stuffing, and in general poorly produced content marked by spelling errors, poor sentences, little social movement and more. It’s important to make sure that when you hire a professional to help you with SEO, you’re not inadvertently working with one who thinks they can essentially outwit Google.

Due to the lack of professional standards within the industry and the global nature of shady SEO firms, the best way to judge expertise is to review their work and note the presence or lack of quality. Do they talk about creating a collection of high-quality content, or do they talk about “tricks”? It’s a good idea to stay away from the tricksters, as what they pull could possibly damage your standing in search results or even get your site removed from search results altogether. BWD provides extensive SEO services, and we not only deplore these practices, but thoroughly explain them to our clients as well.

Image courtesy Google.

Appealing images and media will result in more traffic!

The last thing we love about this interactive Google explainer is the part they aren’t explicit explaining, but instead showing viewers. By leading us outside of our instinctive expectation that the online world is still made up of “pages,” Google has created a new and visually compelling scroll of information. There’s something almost irresistible in the visual graphic of a path to follow: our human minds light up with these connections and even regard them as playful. Almost like following the bright yellow line like Dorothy on the road to Oz. Visual innovation and high-quality professional graphics are one of the crucial elements to making your site a place users will enjoy lingering in, and are sure to share with their friends and colleagues, just as we’ve done here!

Need some assistance or production for your own SEO campaigns? Give us a ring and our team will get started with you right away.

Adore Your Place is one of the many websites where we’ve used the beautiful font, Museo Sans.

It’s no secret that BWD loves the Museo family of fonts by artist Jos Buivenga of Arnhem. We’ve use one of the family’s flagship options–Museo Sans–for tons of our projects including Valenches Music Company and School, our own website, NordiDock Concrete Floating Dock Systems, and many others. Museo offers up a perfect taste of class with a modern twist. Its letters’ shapes carry great weight while also remaining delicate and fresh, providing a fantastic modern look over the tired sans serif font options found on so many websites today. It shines equally bright in both headings and blocks of body text.

Even better yet, Museo is one of the fantastic font families offered up by Typekit, one of the leading and first companies to provide beautiful, innovative, and unique fonts in great web formats alongside strict accessibility and usability standards. We use Typekit for almost every single one of our projects, and the results always yield final websites that look fantastic.

There’s Museo regular and Museo Slab as well, both fully mature font options depending on your style. Personally, we’re suckers for slab style fonts, so you’ll find us using this sharp guy wherever we can. We’re also very glad that Buivenga moved on to create it:

When Museo became a succes I researched some possibilities of other versions. First I couldn’t find the right solutions to all Museo Slab’s design hurdles, but about one year later —after a radio interview with Aaron and Matt from RBtL —my interest in Museo Slab got fired up again. Don’t know why, but this time I got it all working.

What do you think? Does this font tickle your design fancy as much as it does ours? Could you see this font making a name–quite literally–for your small business? 

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As you can imagine, this huge first impression has the potential to go a number of different ways. To ensure that you make the best one possible, here are eight elements that make up the best small (and medium!) business websites based on our 10 years of work with WordPress and small business clients.

In this exciting snapshot of a design in progress for a financial company, we’ve framed a pitch statement in a bold, attractive manner on the front page.

1. A one-sentence story or “pitch statement” above the fold

Come up with a single sentence that answers these two questions: What do you offer? and What’s unique about you? This sentence should be placed where it’s immediately visible, without scrolling or what we call “above the fold” (sort of like the days of newsprint). The challenge here is to choose the fewest words that carry the greatest and most concise meaning.

2. Strategic “calls to action”

As much as you might think otherwise, it’s important to tell the user exactly what you want them to do in a dynamic environment. Identify your conversion goals by identifying behavior that would yield a favorable outcome or goal for your company. Do you want them to: Sign up for a newsletter with their email address? Sign up for membership? Follow through with a purchase? By following through with design elements that are pleasing and eye-catching, you’ll be well on your way towards more revenue and traction.

You might also find helpful: 3 Keys to Beginner’s Conversion Optimization for Small Business Websites (& the Money You’re Losing Without Them!) for more on the subject of calls to action and the field of conversion optimization in web design.

3. Show off your products or services

Customers have wanted to see what they’re buying since the dawn of the first thrifty bazaar merchant, and this preference hasn’t changed just because marketplaces have moved online. Graphics, photos, and other types of images are simple if you’re selling a physical product (hamburgers can be downright gorgeous onscreen!), but even if your product is a service, you can still come up with screenshots or great ways to frame your work. Use your creativity to decide how to feature visual content, and here are some examples to get you started:

• For software, include screenshots for each feature framed in a mock computer screen
• For a dog walking service, show some great shots of you or your employees enjoying your time with your client’s precious pets
• For a hair salon, include photos of your fabulously satisfied clients and their final dos
• For a small bed and breakfast, feature some of your best rooms and amazing breakfasts by appealing to their stomachs and hearts!

4. Video is a main course, not a frivolous dessert

A 30 to 60 second video with interesting content will keep users on your page, and videos can fluently demonstrate aspects of your product that words and pictures alone can’t describe. As a result, videos should never be buried on inner pages and should definitely be featured above the fold on your front page. You can easily host the video on YouTube or Vimeo to keep costs super low, and work with a fellow small business production agency to produce a video that’s high quality and affordable.

Need more convincing? Cisco systems has found that 40% of consumer internet traffic consists of video watching. They predict that this percentage will reach 62% by 2015. YouTube recently announced that it has reached 3 billion views per day.

Would you like to pursue a project like this but don’t know where to start? Give us a ring!

5.  Highlight your phone number and location!

Whether or not you maintain an actual storefront, potential customers will want to make sure you’re serious about your work by quickly identifying a location and address. And if you do maintain an actual storefront, make sure your contact information is immediately visible. Users will rarely take time out of their precious search for their new favorite dinner spot to figure out where the heck your cross streets are located. A highlighted phone number and quick and easy directions for any business can be enormously helpful, and often makes the difference in a final sale.

These details are especially important in mobile settings–even if you have the same version of your website for both desktop and mobile–as users may be on-the-go and in desperate need of your details. If you fail to provide them with this information quickly and easily, customers will simply move onto the next option.

BWD Portfolio Showcase: Pho66 clearly and quickly details where their restaurant is located, and how to reach them.

6. Give potential customers a quick taste

If you’re selling a service or piece of software, provide an easily accessible demo or trial for your product. If there’s no way to provide a taste, clearly outline and feature past case studies, successful portfolio examples, and testimonials from happy clients. Your potential customers will be much more confident moving forward if they know your products and services are valued and well respected by others, and you’ll be able to set a competitive price as well.

7. Write an informative “about” page

People visiting your site will look for the word “About” in order to learn more not only about the company but the people who make their purchased products or services happen as well. Use an about page as a chance to personally connect with customers by showing where you work, how you work, or some details about what type of company culture you maintain.

8. Always, always, always: produce fresh content

The most important for last: Back in the early days of the web, businesses could simply create static pages that were essentially online versions of their brochures, and they’d be set for a few years. Today, search engine rankings and SEO are dependent on how frequently new content is posted on a domain. In addition, high quality content that is sharable and highly sought after will provide plentiful inbound links and traffic. Watch your analytics closely to see what type of content produces the best results–such as increased traffic or more customers–and produce more of it.

You might also find helpful: 4 SEO Reasons your Business Should Have Started Blogging Yesterday or our excellent introductory “course” for small business owners: an Introduction to the Art of Link Building: the Gold Standard in Internet Marketing and SEO.

Would you like to get your business started on a great path based on any one of these eight elements? Just send us a message and we’ll send you a proposal asap.

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