Quite often, businesses struggle with graphics and imagery to use in their marketing, on their websites, and in their brochures to show their products and services. Sometimes, small businesses in particular don’t have the budget to get good quality photography done, and it can be a challenge to take photos in-house – you may not have the time, or an appropriate location for instance. Many resort to stock photography, which is fine, but never really encapsulates your services or products in the right way, and can look cheap or ‘not quite right’.
For this reason, we suggest using some simple, unique, but informative illustrations to fill those gaps. here are some examples:
Illustrations and graphics like these can fulfill a range of purposes:
They look crisp and clean on your website and marketing
They can illustrate your product or services without getting dated when you release a new product
They are customizable and unique to you
We create the graphics, saving you time looking for images that may not work or misrepresent your brand
They can replace in-house photos that may not look as professional as you’d like
Starting at around $45, they are affordable too, so if you’d like to jazz-up your marketing, get in touch and we’ll start creating graphics for you!
We’re often asked what software we use or recommend using to create a website, and how CMS software works. This post make’s some recommendations of what to use, and a little bit about what a content management system is and how it works.
What is a CMS?
Before the content management system existed, websites, pages, and posts needed to be created using hand-coded HTML or by using a drag-and-drop program like Adobe Dreamweaver and then uploaded manually to the web server. Pages needed to be edited manually by someone who knew how to create and edit HTML code, which could become complex and cumbersome to manage. Dreamweaver did make the process easier, but you still needed a moderate level of technical knowledge in order to update and publish your pages.
Now, we have Content Management Systems (CMS). A CMS is basically a software program that runs your website; it makes the creation of web pages, the publishing of posts, and the management of content much easier, so that even someone with little or no technical knowledge can create and publish their own website or blog without having to commission a web developer.
With that being said, a CMS-based website can start out simple, and can get more complex as your site grows, so understanding and managing your particular system becomes important so you don’t lose control or web site efficiency. But you can customize as much as you like and make things really complicated if you want to!
The CMS software is installed onto your web server or hosting plan and provides the interface to view your web pages& content in a web browser, and edit them. A content management system can have multiple plugins or modules that allow extended functionality and features, such as web stores, online payments, booking calendars, galleries, sliders, and more.
But this doesn’t mean that Dreamweaver and hand-coding are dead; far from it. Most CMS’s allow some degree of customization and manual coding, and many developers enjoy creating their sites by hand or with Adobe Dreamweaver’s feature-rich programming. It adds a level of customization and individuality otherwise unavailable; but it’s not for everyone.
In Layman’s Terms, How Does a CMS Work?
To go into a bit more detail, the CMS sits above a database on a web server within your hosting plan, and provides the framework with which you manage your site’s pages and content, and then makes those pages and content available to viewers browsing your website. As the user interacts with the website, the CMS pulls the required information from the database and displays it in the user’s web browser.
Editing a website, page, or post in a CMS can be as simple or as complex as an administrator wants, depending on the individual’s level of technical skill and comfort. For instance, with WordPress, you can use the default WordPress editor system to edit your pages and posts, or you can install a more complex editor such as Elementor for more customization options.
Recommended CMS Frameworks
So what are Gleneden Ridge Design’s Content Management Systems of choice? Well, we use a few, depending on individual site specification and circumstance:
WordPress:https://wordpress.org/ Easy to setup and use, manageable from any computer, tablet, or phone, easily customizable, no coding required, the blog is built-in and ready-to-go, and it has tons of free plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Always a bonus!
Wix:https://www.wix.com/ Wix is an online web site builder that uses templated technology to design and create your website using a drag-and-drop interface. Free hosting and domain names are included with their package, and there are a range of options available, including SEO modules, online stores, email marketing, and contact resource management (CRM). The system is intuitive, extensive, affordable, but as with any template-based model, the system isn’t as flexible or customizable as some other systems, but is ideal for small businesses, non-profits, etc.
DotNetNuke (DNN):https://www.dnnsoftware.com/ A good choice for larger, corporate sites where multiple integrated portals are required (such as web applications or intranets), DNN has great security, speed, stability, and flexibility, with loads of premium modules available from the DNN Store, but you do need a moderate level of technical knowledge to get by, especially with more advanced configurations and options.
HubSpot:https://www.hubspot.com/ More of an entire marketing solution rather than a CMS, Hubspot is ideal for enterprise and small business use, but the sheer breadth and depth of the system may be overwhelming to some users. It has a range of package options available, from a free (but limited) entry-level package to a full-size enterprise marketing solution, including email management, calls-to-action, web pages, landing pages, contact management, marketing lists, and file management. And there are plenty of add-ons in the HubSpot Marketplace too. It’s a monthly subscription package and lives in the cloud. As such, you have access to all of it’s core features from anywhere, you don’t have to worry about backup or security since Hubspot does all of that for you, and their technical support is second to none. You do pay for all of that, however, since it’s not cheap.
These are our recommended CMS systems, but there are lots more out there. If there is a CMS not listed here that you’d be interested in, then let us know. If you’d like more info on any of these systems, or if you need help with your website, please contact us – we’d be happy to advise and help!
There are many ways to market your products and services online. Your website can be considered the cornerstone of your online marketing campaigns, and in this post, we outline some of the ways to setup your website and other online platforms to bring prospects to your website and turn them into clients.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The mother of all online marketing. SEO is the process of building in search criteria to your web pages, so that your website can be properly crawled and indexed by Google, Bing, and all of the other search engines out there, and then displayed in organic search results. This includes not only the SEO Title, Description, and of course your Keywords, but also Alt-text for all of your images, SEO titles for your social media and other links, ensuring that you use good, descriptive naming for your images, files, and pages, and making sure that you have really good quality content, which these days can be more important that your keywords.
Other things that effect your SEO are backlinks (links to your site from other sites), and the quality of the domain, content, and usage, such as how often your site or products are mentioned on other sites and online resources, for instance.
Then of course there’s Local SEO. This differs to the usual SEO as your meta tags and content target your potential local audience, so you’ll be building in local place names, regions, landmarks, etc into your content and data. This can be further enhanced by completing your Google My Business listing (and other local directory listings) accurately and informatively; don’t forget to make full use of their posting, messaging, and promotions features.
Keywords, Descriptions, and Titles
Meta keywords, descriptions, and titles should reflect and represent the content and images contained within a given page. Keep it simple and concise, using words, phrases, and sentences that outline your page. Don’t stuff your meta tags full of keywords as this is more likely to demote your site rather than promote it.
Content in Online Marketing
Same here; your on-page content should detail what the page is all about, without any filler copy, keyword-stuffing, or irrelevant text. Writing your copy like this ensures that you’ll get the most organic traffic from your page, and your organic keywords and backlinks will grow, slowly but surely. Images should have their alt-text completed in a similar manner, hyperlinks should have relevant titles, and so should buttons and call-to-actions, which again, should direct the user to more detail, or other useful resources.
Organic vs Direct
So what do we mean by organic and direct?
When it comes to visitors, an organic visitor is one that finds you on Google while searching for sites like yours, where as a direct visitor is one that already knows your website address and just types it into their web browser.
Regarding SEO, organic keywords and backlinks are those that build up in the Google search index or are picked up by other listing sites over time because of your awesome content, whereas on-page keywords are those that you’ve physically entered into the meta tags of the page.
Pay Per Click Ads
Pay Per Click Ads are setup within the Google or Facebook interfaces, for instance, and work on a auction system, whereby you set a value for your ad to appear whenever someone searches with the appropriate search terms. To win (to have your ad appear at the top of the listings), you need to optimize your ad for a variety of factors, such as ad quality, bid amount, search terms, and business demographic. You are only charged when someone clicks on your ad.
Email Marketing
With email marketing, you create promotional emails and send them out to groups of users. These users can be registered subscribers from your own website, or users from a list that you’ve purchased. Whichever the case, the users need to subscribe explicitly to receive your emails, otherwise it’s considered spamming and is looked upon rather gravely.
Email Marketing software comes in a variety of forms and price points. If you have a WordPress website, you can use a CRM such as GroundHogg to create mailing lists and design and send emails. Otherwise, you can use a mail service such as MailChimp, which has a variety of packages to suit anyone, and is intuitive and as in-depth as you need it to be.
Blogs
Blogs are everywhere on the internet, talking about any topic that you can think of. They are essentially web pages where the author creates and displays posts about specific topics, relevant to the website, services, products, or area of interest. The great thing is that you can link them directly to your website, and build SEO data to them, so blogs are really worthwhile when it comes to online marketing.
Social media
There seems to be a new social media platform appearing every week, and it’s difficult to keep up. Our advice is to use the platforms that are relevant to what you do, rather than trying to cover everything. Social media is great for getting the word around regarding your products and service, it can even ‘go viral’ if enough people share your content around. You can place informational content, instructional videos, help and advice, images, and testimonials on your timelines. But remember to update your content regularly as social media moves fast and your content can get quickly lost among the plethora of other posts out there.
Below, we outline a few of the most prevalent ones:
Facebook
The archetypal social media platform, almost everyone knows Facebook. It allows you to setup profiles and pages, follow friends and businesses, shared media, posts, and other content, and communicate effectively and freely with Facebook Messenger. https://www.facebook.com/
Twitter
Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ network in which you can follow others, and share short content snippets of up to 140 characters. https://twitter.com
LinkedIn
The social media platform of choice for careers, companies, freelancers, and other business opportunities. Connect with and share info with companies, business people, professionals, and prospects. https://www.linkedin.com
Instagram
Instagram is a visual social media platform. Consisting almost entirely of images, the platform allows users to share pictures and videos with their followers. https://www.instagram.com
Tumblr
This platform allows users to create a ‘Tumblelog’ of short blog and media posts for their audience. The platform has a more free-form approach than other social media, and is very customizable. https://www.tumblr.com/
YouTube
The world’s #1 video platform, YouTube allows users to upload, edit and share videos, create playlists, comment on videos and subscribe to other users’ video channels. https://www.youtube.com/
Other Social Media
There are a ton of other social media channels out there, and it would be difficult for us to cover them all, so here are a list of many common ones.
Banner Ads, Interstitials and Popup Ads
Banner Ads
Banner ads can go on your own or partner websites to highlight products or services, or on Facebook pages and other social media, or on industry-specific or magazine websites. Obviously, the later are chargeable, and pricing can be expensive, so pick-and-choose where you going to place your banner ads with care.
Interstitial Ads
Interstitial ads are those that appear in the transition when you’re browsing from one website page to another on the same site. They tend to be full page, advertise a great deal of detail about your product or service, and are generally placed on industry-specific or magazine websites. Be careful to check pricing structure if you’re interested in this kind of ad placement.
Popup Ads
Popup ads can appear on your own site, or on those of magazine or industry-specific websites, at a premium of course for the latter. They generally contain info that could be useful to the viewer, offers, or downloads for instance, and can be set to appear after a time interval, or when a viewer scrolls a certain percentage of the way down a page, or on entrance to, or exit from, a page on your site.
Building Backlinks
As mentioned above, backlinks can build up organically over time because of the good, relevant content and meta tags on your pages, but if you invest some time and effort into organizing your backlink strategy, you can also gain additional backlinks a little quicker by exchanging guest posts, partner page logos, banner ads, and other honorable mentions on partner and client websites.
In Conclusion
Whatever way or ways that you consider for your online marketing, make sure you’re aware of the pricing, time, and effort that goes into putting a marketing campaign together. Many of the above methods are free, and can be linked together for increased coverage, however, they can take up a lot of your time. Putting together a marketing campaign, and maintaining it can be taxing on your resources, but it can also be very effective and bringing visitors to your website, which of course can turn into prospects, who can then turn into clients, so it’s very worthwhile.
Remember though, that we are here to help, and if you need any advice, guidance, or assistance in putting together your ads, marketing campaigns, and maintaining them, please get in touch as we’re very happy to help.
Many small businesses struggle with their online presence; they may only have a Facebook page or a basic website. And many businesses may be unsure of how to go about creating a website, know little of how to go about marketing their services or products, and terms like ‘SEO’, ‘Local SEO’, ‘CMS’, and ‘Meta description’ have very little meaning. Let’s try and shed some light on these important topics from a high level.
Websites and Website-building Systems
Put basically, a website is a collection of canonically-organized web pages, images, text, posts, and other content that are available on the internet by accessing a specific URL or address, either by directly typing the address into the web browser’s address bar, or by using a search engine like Google to search for specific sites, services, or products.
Information on your web pages is known as content, and consists of all of the text or copy on your website, as well as the images, galleries, links, contact details, maps, blog posts, categories, services, and products.
Virtually anyone with even a small amount of technical knowledge can create a website these days. Service Providers such as Wix & GoDaddy make it easy to put a simple site together using a built-in website builders and out-of-the-box templates with a drag-and-drop interface.
But these templated sites are not always ideal for business websites that need to grow, use advanced features, customize the design, or want more creative freedom. That’s why Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, DotNetNuke, Joomla, and HubSpot exist (see this previous post for more info on CMS). With the vast number of options, plugins, and modules available for these systems, you can do pretty much whatever you want to do online. You do, however, need a bit more technical knowledge to create sites this way since there are many more intricacies involved when compared to a typical templated web-builder site.
If you need help with building your website at any stage, please contact us and we’d be happy to help.
SEO and Local SEO
Search Engine Optimization
Once you have your website, whether its a templated or created with a CMS, you want people to be able to find it online and to search it’s pages. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is the process of building data into your web pages so that search engines like Google and Bing can find your site, and then guide internet users who are searching for your services or products to your content, rather that the website of your competitors.
Each particular search engine (Google for instance) has it’s own robots that continuously crawl the internet, exploring all websites and pages that have the appropriate meta tags and SEO data configured. Meta tags are invisible to the viewer, and contain SEO data, such as SEO titles, SEO descriptions, and SEO keywords that are relevant to the content on that page. Once a page has been crawled, it’s listed in the search engine’s index and can then be found for those searching for topics relevant to your site. How well your site is listed depends greatly upon a range of factors, such as:
the quality of the meta tag content
the quality of the content on your site pages
the number of ‘backlinks’ to your site – which is how many other sites link to you – this can build-up over time organically
the number of links between the your website content and pages, your social media, and other online resources
This means that you need to make sure that your the text and images on your web pages are as well written, relevant, descriptive as possible, and that you keep it fresh, by updating your content regularly, publishing new blog posts, adding new features, etc.
Local SEO
Local SEO takes all of this a step further, and is especially important to those businesses that operate within a given radius, within a particular city ore region for example. Local SEO helps to ensure that the website of a local business can be found when users are searching for products or services within that given city or region.
This involves building the local area city and region names into your meta tags, on-page content, and blog posts. You should also create locally-named social media posts, and make sure that your online business listings (such as your Google My Business profile) are as complete as possible and list your local business area.
Other traditional marketing techniques can also help with raising your local SEO profile too, such as vehicle signage, posters, lawn signs, and so on.
All of this information works together, so that potential customers can go online, search for what they need, find your website, review your services and products, and then purchase them, thus becoming actual customers.
That’s how Search Engine Optimization can help your business. But you need to create your website first, and then build in the SEO data to start getting noticed.
What data is needed for these elements?
Some of the data that needs to be built and configured into into your pages and content consists of the following:
Website content: the text and images that forms the bulk of your page items
Alt-text: text applied to your images so they become searchable as well as your text
Image description: an optimized description for the image itself
SEO Title: an optimized title for your page
SEO description: an optimized description for the page and its content
SEO keywords: a comma-separated list of words and phrases that describes and outlines what your products or services are all about.
Lets take a look at each of these items in a little more detail:
Website content
Content consists of the text and images on the page that describes what your site is all about. This is key to your SEO as your textual content needs to be relevant to the page topic; descriptive, detailed, and concise.
Alt-text
Images themselves are not searchable when placed on a web page. Instead, we need to add ‘Alt-text’ to the images so they become searchable like your text. The alt-text should be a brief description of the image so that it’s relevant to the page content. They appear and are configured in the ‘Alt-text’ attribute of your image.
Image Description
Like the SEO description, the image description expands upon the alt-text content, and should be descriptive, concise, and around 160 characters. Image description is configured in the ‘image description’ attribute for your image.
SEO Title
The SEO Title is the title that appears in the results that appear on a search results page when someone searches for your site. It should be short and descriptive, around 60 characters. They appear and are configured in the ‘Meta Title’ attribute of your web page.
SEO Description
Like the SEO Title, the SEO description is the text that appears on the search results page when someone searches for your content. It should be descriptive but concise, and around 160 characters. They appear and are configured in the ‘Meta description’ attribute of your web page.
SEO keywords
The keywords are a comma-separated list of words and phrases that describe and outline what your products and services are all about. They appear and are configured in the ‘Meta Keywords’ attribute of your web page.
keywords are not as important as they used to be, since current search engines tend to scan the actual on-page content to ensure that the text and other SEO content on the page are accurate, concise, makes sense, and are relevant to what users may be searching for.
How are all these elements added to a web page?
There are lots of ways to create websites and pages; it depends largely on the software used to set them up:
Cloud-based website creators
As mentioned above, online services such as Wix and GoDaddy have a drag-and-drop interface that allows a person with limited technical knowledge to create a website quickly and easily from pre-configured templates. Functions within these interfaces allow you to add alt-text to images, as well as meta tags for your page self, all in the page properties sections.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
With a content management system, you can add alt-text directly in the page editor, but the various SEO meta tags are configured differently depending on the CMS. With DotNetNuke for instance, the SEO info is setup in the page properties, whereas with WordPress, you need to add a plugin that allows you to add the SEO meta data. (there are lots of good free ones available).
HTML code
If you’re knowledgeable enough, you can hand-code your pages using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), or use a drag-and-drop software package, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, to put your pages together. The alt-text and meta tags are added by coding them into their respective elements, or by adding the data to the page header properties or image properties if using Dreamweaver.
For more information on website creation, search engine optimization, or marketing, please contact us; we’d be happy to help!
A great many websites get attacked or hacked every day, and a large proportion of those are against small business websites! This only goes to show that it’s not just the bigger organizations and companies that become targets; small businesses are targets too, and sometimes through ignorance that they just think they’re too small to be noticed, and some because they just don’t have adequate security safeguards in place.
Here we’ll outline a few things that small businesses can do to secure their online presence from cyber-crime.
Website Security Threats: An Overview
Websites get attacked in many different ways, so here’s a brief overview of the most common security threats.
Spam
Ever been contacted by a foreign entrepreneur, asking you to claim money on their behalf> That’s a typical spam gig. Easy to spot and harmless; most of us simply ignore this kind of junk nowadays.
But sometimes, spam can be more insidious. One common tactic is for a hacker to find your unshielded website or blog, then setup bots to flood your comments with links to their site, attempting to create backlinks to boost their own web presence. This can be very harmful to your own website presence because Google’s own bots can detect these malicious links on your site and demote it – or even black list it – in their listings. Additionally, the hacker’s links may contain phishing links or other malware, which in turn will demote your rankings even further.
They also make your site look really trashy, often driving away regular visitors, thus potentially losing you business.
Whatever the case, you’ll find your SEO rankings sinking like the Titanic if you don’t take steps to mitigate this behaviour.
Viruses and Malware
Malware and viruses come in lots of varieties, and such can be a massive threat to your website.
Viruses and malicious software tend to be used to access your private data, or to utilize your own website hosting to run services on behalf of a hacker. You site can be hacked, have monetized ads placed upon it, or be replaced with a completely different site of the hackers making. Hackers can install malware into your web server and/or computer in a variety of ways, such as phishing emails, URL redirects, and directly hacking an unprotected site.
The single biggest thing here is not to click on anything in an email or message that looks unfamiliar or weird. Educate your staff and clients on the importance of online and email security. Remember that both you and your customers are at risk from anyone who finds a way to exploit your website. You could find that your clients are coming after you because they’ve lost money through something that they clicked on in your website, which ultimately is the business owners responsibility to keep secure.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
DDoS attacks block access to users trying to visit a specific website. Using spoof servers and IP addresses, the hacker overload a particular server or website with a massive amount of random traffic, tying all the resources of the server, crashing your website.
Hackers use this technique for various purposes. Once your server is offline, it becomes vulnerable since it’s security systems are down, and the cyber criminal can plant all manner of malware on it, ready to infect an unwitting public. For this reason, web service providers offer additional protection, such as cloud security, which can block security loop holes until the website or server is back up and running. Hackers in the employ of rival companies can also use this technique to crash the web services of their competition, making them look unprofessional.
WHOIS Domain Registration Database
When you buy a domain name for your website, you’ll be required to release information about yourself. This information is recorded and is available publicly on the WHOIS data database. This database contains personal information, your domain, URL, name servers, and other web-related info that hackers can use to search for websites and servers that may have vulnerabilities.
Of course, being publicly available, there’s not much you can do about this, but it does reinforce the case that you do need to keep you website and web server secure.
Search Engine Blacklists
As mentioned above, having your site hacked can hit your Google positioning and diminish your SEO substantially. And if internet users report your site as ‘spammy’ or malicious, it could be added to a search engine blacklist, which is an extremely difficult corner to get out of.
The best way is to avoid being reported in the first place. Create a clean, safe site for your website users, make sure both your website and your web server and/or hosting package is secure, and always use a reputable internet service provider, such as Hostpapa.ca.
Keeping your website safe
You can’t just assume that your website is secure. It may be hosted on a supposedly secure host, with a professional ‘small business’ hosting package with a ‘all-in-one’ security add-on pack, but if you haven’t taken steps to configure your cloud-based firewall beyond the basics, or set up spam protection, or install a WordPress security plugin, then your website is probably vulnerable to some kind of attack. The Internet moves quickly, and even if you have done all of these, you still need to keep everything up-to-date, and under continuous review.
It’s complex, but what are the most important steps to take to improve your security?
Use HTTPS instead of HTTP
One of the top priorities on your security list should be making sure that your website loads using HTTPS(Hyper Text Transport Protocol Secure), rather than the unsecure HTTP(Hyper Text Transport Protocol).
HTTPS tells your website visitors that they’re loading the actual website that they want from the correct server that it’s hosted on, and not a hijacked or hacked version. Without using HTTPS, a hacker could potentially edit info and data on your website or page, in order to allow the hacker to harvest personal data from your website viewers, such as passwords or credit card information.
Your website visitors will also feel much safer, knowing that your site is loading over a secure channel, as they will see icons similar to this in their web browser address bar:
You can improve your security by using an SSL(secure sockets layer) certificate. These encrypt the communications between the server and the web browser viewing the website, adding an additional layer of security to keep your website safe.
With eCommerce websites, SSL is mandatory since your dealing with private info such as credit cards, but even if you’re not selling online, using HTTPS protocol with an SSL certificate is good practice, and many web hosting providers, such as Hostpapa.ca provide some kind of SSL for free with many of their packages.
Since Google recognizes and promotes using this secure transport protocol, using HTTPS will also improve your search ranking.
Keep your website software up-to-date
Website software needs updating as often as your computer does; sometimes even more so! Always make sure you have the most recent version of WordPress, DotNetNuke, Joomla, or whatever CMS you’re using, and your modules, plugins, CMS, and theme too.
Why keep everything up-to-date? Well hackers use bots to scan for vulnerable websites. And older software can have weak points that make it easy for hackers to exploit your site. And you may not know anything about it until it’s too late.
If you’re unsure about how to manage this aspect, contact us and we can advise and assist you.
Choose a website hosting plan with security
We always advise that you use a recognized and recommended service provider with good reviews, so do your homework. Doing so will ensure that you’re using the most secure hardware and software to host and safeguard your website. But even with the best hosts, there are some things to watch out for:
Shared hosting for instance. Shared hosting is where the service provider hosts a range of websites on virtual servers, all located on the same physical server. This makes it cheap, but not necessarily the best choice, since if one of the other sites on the server gets hacked, the cyber-criminal could potentially hack the rest of the sites on the same server much more easily than if they were located on different physical servers.
Cloud or VPS (Virtual Private Servers) are similar to shared hosting, but much more secure and still have a reasonable price port, so those types of plans would be a better option.
Change your password regularly
Not surprisingly, the best hackers can crack passwords really quickly, sometimes within minutes. That’s why you need to change your password regularly. You can use password manager software to help manage and secure your passwords, but however you manage it, change your passwords at least every 6 months at least, if not more.
You should also enable two-factor authentication on your host, website, and any associated services. In fact its mandatory with credit card processing services such as Stripe. 2-factor authentication requires that you confirm a login on a separate device such as your phone, thus adding an additional layer of security.
Secure your desktop or laptop computer
Desktop computers are typically infected by viruses and malware when phishing emails are opened or malicious sites are accessed. This can open up your private information for hackers to steal, which is why you need good antivirus software on your computer. If your own PC is insecure, when you login to your website, sensitive data can be immediately accessed by a criminal in order for them to utilize your website for nefarious purposes without you knowing.
And if you’re a business owner or IT manager, make sure that your staff are adequately trained and aware of what they should and shouldn’t open on their work computers.
Monitor your security
Its difficult to block every attack online, but there are tools and resources available that allow you to monitor your website. You can run audits that will give you a cross-section of your website, give you security info, and highlight vulnerabilities. This in turn means that you can take steps to prevent an attack before it happens, or be alerted when an attack is in progress so you can stop it and fix any damage.
Many security issues arise due to human error – someone didn’t lock a PC before they left, or used an application they shouldn’t have – and one of the best ways to prevent this is to limit user access. Users should only have the permissions they need to do their job, and if someone is not meant to be a website admin, don’t give them the roles to do so. It’s as simple as that!
Having multiple users accessing your systems can lead to a lack of responsibility, and therefore potential security issues. Therefore, every user should have their own login credentials; you’ll find your staff much more accountable with this in place.
Backup your website
This is a no-brainer; always back up your site. Backup before you run an update, after you run an update, and at least every week, if not every night. Most hosting services come preloaded with some kind of backup solution, or have it as an add-on. And CMS software like WordPress has multiple options for backup plugins; we recommend and use Updraft.
Change default settings
Hackers use automated bots to find vulnerable sites, and one kind of vulnerability is a site with default settings. So when you’ve installed your website software, whatever it may be, make sure you change some of the defaults:
Comments settings
User registration role settings
Information visibility
File permissions
Restricting file uploads
In many cases, your website will need to have forms or functionality where users can upload their own files to your website. And as it’s more-than-possible for one of these users to be using a computer that may be infected with some kind of malware, this functionality should always be treated as if it was a potential threat.
You can help mitigate this risk by either restricting file types (in your CMS settings you’ll be able to customize the ‘allowed file types for uploading’ settings, so that only recognized, legitimate file types can be uploaded by users) or you can use third-party software or plugins to create a secure file upload system with virus protection and security.
Website Security: In Conclusion
Security of your website should be one of your top priorities as everyone is at risk, and even if you do take every measure, you could still be affected in some way, so you need to be vigilant. By employing all the tools available, you may not be able to make your web site totally secure, but you can make it difficult to crack; hackers are often looking for a quick result, and if there’s some security, it can be a deterrent. When you setup your web server or hosting, and build your website, make sure you put at least some of these ideas into place, and if you’re unsure, hire the services of someone who does know something about online security.
Online Marketing Plans & Time Banks from Gleneden Ridge Design
We are fully aware of how hard it can be to keep a small business running these days, and with marketing budgets being reduced it’s not getting any easier. That’s why we’ve developed value-added plans for online marketing, blogs, and social media, website maintenance, search engine optimization, graphic design, and website development.
Our SEO, blog & social media, maintenance, and marketing plans run for one year from the date-of-purchase and are calculated at a much lower hourly rate than if you pay for your services on a month-by-month or hourly basis.
Similarly, our design & development time banks offer an increasing discount on our hourly rate, depending on the number of hours that you purchase. Time bank hours do not expire; you just ‘top-up’ when you get low.
Here’s the full range of Gleneden Ridge Design Plans and Programs:
Annual Website SEO & Maintenance Plans
Our Search Engine Optimization programs include initial SEO setup and configuration, monthly Google Analytics reports, and continuous on-page and back-end adjustments to your website to maximize its search potential.
SEO plans now also include a maintenance component, so we keep your core software, modules and plugins, and settings up to date, as well as running regular backups.
Blog and social media programs include the setup of your blog page, integrating the new blog (or an existing one) with your social media accounts (if required), quarterly post schedules, writing, design, and setup of weekly or bi-weekly blog and social media posts, and posting to all applicable online channels.
Get a better hourly rate by purchasing a Gleneden Ridge Design Time Bank! Gleneden Ridge Design is priced to make marketing easier on your pocket, so you can grow your business without blowing your entire budget on websites and graphics, but if you purchase a Design & Development Time Bank, you can secure a lower hourly rate and save as much as 33% over the standard rate.
Custom SEO, Campaign, Development, and Design Programs
If you need a customized SEO, Social Media, or Marketing Program, then we can create a program just for you. Whatever you need, we can come up with a program customized to your requirements. Just contact us and tell us what you need and we’ll do the rest!
One piece of the SEO puzzle is finding out what’s missing from a website or blog’s content, and analyzing pages and posts regularly, especially when compared with competitors, is a big part of what Gleneden Ridge Web Design does in its SEO & Online Marketing programs. This kind of research can reveal a great deal of information, such as what additional pieces of content to create, where to use it, and how it can be most effective.
But how do we go about scanning a website for clues? We use a suite of online tools from Google Analytics and ahrefs.com to review, analyze, and explore all kinds of website data, such as:
keywords and phrases used to find your content
number of hits on a page and length of time spent on a given page
content and keyword rank positioning and change in position
keywords and content that your competitors rank for but you don’t
errors and issues within the on-page and back-end technical SEO of a site
errors and issues within the site itself, such as missing pages, broken links, missing images, or incorrect headers
Bridging the Gaps in Your Content
Armed with all of this information, we can then go in and reconfigure your SEO, fix any issues, and create new posts that bridge the content gaps that you’re competitors are taking advantage of.
Of course, if we build your web site, then we automatically configure the initial SEO content into the pages as we go, but SEO is a constantly developing creature, so an annual SEO plan is still recommended to keep your online profile high.
To many businesses, the company website is the keystone of their online marketing campaigns, and it is important, but there are also many other ways to bring prospects to your door, and turn them into clients.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is the process of creating meaningful content and building search criteria into your web pages so that your site gets crawled and indexed by internet search engines, and thus listed in organic search results. This data includes the SEO Title, Description, your Keywords, image Alt-text and descriptions, links, and of course your on-page content.
Its important to note that you should use a good, descriptive naming naming convention for your images, files, and pages, and ensure that you have really good quality content; this is more important that your keywords in today’s world wide web.
Other important aspects of SEO are back-links (which are links to your site from other sites, such as business partners, quality directories, and guest post contributors), and the overall quality of the domain, content, and usage.
Email Marketing
Email marketing, or email database marketing, is the process of creating promotional emails, and sending them out to groups of users. These users can be registered subscribers from your own website, or contacts from a list that you’ve purchased, or created yourself from your own contacts. Whatever the case, all contacts need to agree to receive your emails, otherwise it’s considered spamming and is against the law in many jurisdictions.
Email Marketing software comes in a variety of forms and price points. If you have a WordPress website, you can use a CRM such as GroundHogg to create mailing lists, design, manage, and send emails campaigns. Self-contained marketing systems such as HubSpot also have built-in email campaign management. You can also use a mail service such as MailChimp, which has a variety of packages to suit anyone, and is intuitive and as in-depth as you need it to be.
Blogs
If you can think of a topic, you can pretty much guarantee that someone on the internet has a blog about it. At the core of it, a blog page is a web site where you can create and display posts about specific topics relevant to your area of interest.
The great thing about blogs is that they’re generally located on your website’s root domain, and thus tend to have a great deal of SEO heavy-lift potential. What’s more, a blog can be integrated with your social media platforms, so whatever you post to your blog gets automatically posted to your social media pages. This makes blogs really worthwhile when it comes to online marketing.
Social media
When it comes to social media, try and use the platforms that are best suited and the most relevant to what you do, rather than trying to cover everything. Social media is great for getting the word around regarding your products and service, and keep your content regular and relevant. Use informational content, instructional & infomercial videos, help and advice, images, and testimonials in your social media. But remember social media moves fast and your content can get quickly lost among the plethora of other posts out there.
Below, we outline a few of the most prevalent platforms:
Facebook
Almost everyone knows of or uses Facebook. You can setup profiles and pages, follow friends and businesses, shared media, posts, and other content, and communicate effectively and freely with Facebook Messenger. https://www.facebook.com/
Twitter
Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ network in which you can follow others, and share short content snippets of up to 140 characters. https://twitter.com
LinkedIn
The social media platform of choice for careers, companies, freelancers, and other business opportunities. Connect with and share info with companies, business people, professionals, and prospects. https://www.linkedin.com
Instagram
Instagram is a visual social media platform. Consisting almost entirely of images, the platform allows users to share pictures and videos with their followers. https://www.instagram.com
Tumblr
This platform allows users to create a ‘Tumblelog’ of short blog and media posts for their audience. The platform has a more free-form approach than other social media, and is very customizable. https://www.tumblr.com/
YouTube
The world’s #1 video platform, YouTube allows users to upload, edit and share videos, create playlists, comment on videos and subscribe to other users’ video channels. https://www.youtube.com/
Other Social Media
There are a ton of other social media channels out there, and it would be difficult for us to cover them all, so here are a list of many common ones.
PPC Ads (Pay Per Click Advertising).
Pay Per Click advertising is a form of online advertising whereby ads are designed and setup within a provider’s interface and are shown on search results pages when a user searches for the correct criteria. They generally work on a auction system, whereby a value is set for each ad to appear whenever someone searches with the appropriate search terms. In order to have your PPC ad appear at the top of the search results page, it needs to be optimized for a variety of factors, such as ad quality, bid amount, search terms, key words, and business demographic.
With Pay Per Click advertising, you are only charged when someone clicks on your ad, but the cost can mount up quickly, so it’s important to manage your advertising well.
Banner Ads, Interstitials and Popup Ads
Banner Ads
Banners can go on your own website to highlight products or services, your business partners may allow you to place your banners on their sites if you reciprocate (thus creating SEO backlinks), on social media pages, or on industry-specific or magazine websites. Obviously, the later are chargeable, and pricing can be expensive, so pick-and-choose where you going to place your banner ads with care.
Interstitial Ads
Interstitial ads are those annoying ads that appear in the transition when you’re browsing from one website page to another on the same site. They tend to be full or half-page, advertise a great deal of detail about your product or service, and are generally placed on industry-specific or magazine websites. Be careful to check pricing structure if you’re interested in this kind of ad placement.
Popup Ads
Popup ads can appear on your own site, or on those of magazine or industry-specific websites, at a premium of course for the latter. They generally contain info that could be useful to the viewer, offers, or downloads for instance, and can be set to appear after a time interval, or when a viewer scrolls a certain percentage of the way down a page, or on entrance to, or exit from, a page on your site.
In Conclusion
Whatever way or ways that you consider for your online marketing, make sure you’re aware of the pricing, time, and effort that goes into putting a marketing campaign together. Many of the above methods are free, and can be linked together for increased coverage, however, they can take up a lot of your time. Putting together a marketing campaign, and maintaining it can be taxing on your resources, but it can also be very effective and bringing visitors to your website, which of course can turn into prospects, who can then turn into clients, so it can be worthwhile.
Remember though, that Gleneden Ridge Design can help with any online or offline marketing solution, and if you need any advice, guidance, or assistance in putting together your ads, marketing campaigns, and maintaining them, please get in touch as we’re very happy to help.
Alt text, also called alternative text, alt-text, alt-tags, and image text, plays a big part in your website’s SEO and accessibility, more so today than ever before since those alt-tags now not only work towards your SEO, but also because they get read by a web browser’s accessibility services and screen readers, ensuring that your images get seen even by the blind. In some cases, such as in many areas of industry of the US, it’s actually illegal to not have alt-text for a website image, and that’s starting to be the case in Canada too.
In this post, we aim to give you some best practices in order to get the most out of your images and alt-tags.
What is Alt text?
First of all, lets quickly go over what alt text is. basically, its a textual description of an image that is applied to an image on a web page. This text appears if for some reason the image cannot be shown, and also hold substantial SEO value, so it’s important to get it right. It’s also the text that gets read by screen readers and accessibility software for visually impaired users.
An alt text attribute is added to an image within the HTML code like this:
<img src=”Alttextimage.jpg” alt=”Alt text Sample”>
Note that most website builder software, such as Wix, WordPress, DotNetNuke, and Joomla allows you to add alt text without having to write code, which makes the process much easier and quicker.
Writing your Alt text
Now on to the alt text itself. Quite simply, just write a brief description of what the image contains. That’s it!
So for this image:
You could write ‘fresh farm eggs farm sign leaning against a tree’ for the alternative image text.
But there are some things that really should be avoided.
Things to avoid when writing Alternative text
Don’t leave the Alt text field blank: this serves no purpose, makes the image useless if not loaded, has no SEO value, it becomes unreadable to screen readers for accessibility, and in some case – such as in government and healthcare usage, it’s fast becoming illegal to have a blank alt-text tag.
Don’t use too many keywords: this is called ‘keyword stuffing’, and will affect your SEO negatively, as well as being difficult to understand or read. By all means use a keyword, but don’t pack it. For instance, an example of keyword stuffing for the image above could be ‘fresh farm eggs free run eggs fresh eggs eggs fresh’
Try and use less than 125 characters: since this is the maximum number of characters that search engines will show regarding images.
Avoid the use of ‘image of’ and ‘picture of’ phrases: since you’re obviously working on an image, there’s no need to specify it.
Don’t forget the ‘Description’ tag: Useful for additional SEO-ready information, and for items that need a description longer the 125 characters.
And don’t forget about buttons, CTAs etc: They’re also images, and need alt text too, such as ‘Submit now’ or ‘Download the guide’.
Adding a description
As noted above, you can also add a description to your images. This allows you to expand further on your alt tag info and include a detailed explanation. It can provide access to more complete information on the image, and can include a URL.
Additional SEO info
More Information on Alt text and SEO in general can be found here:
So your website’s looking tired, outdated, your best friend’s brother put it together for you and you’re just not happy with it. So what do you do without spending a fortune?
Come and talk to Gleneden Ridge Web Design, because from now until the end of Summer, we taking $10 off our hourly rate for website upgrades and redesigns! That’s $50 per hour, rather than $60, so come and talk to us and give your site a boost!
This Special Summer Offer includes the following:
Redesign of your current website content and/or theme
Upgrading the features, modules, and plugins on your current website
Adding new features and functionality to your current website
The offer does not extend to annual programs or time banks since those plans are already discounted. It also doesn’t extend to any third-party services or premium modules/themes/plugins that require purchase or a subscription.
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