In the days where you'd pick up a phone book to find a business, almost no websites accepted credit cards, in fact, many businesses didn't at their bricks and mortar site. But that's all changed now, with more and more purchases, even of major items, being conducted online. And the only easy way to accomplish those transactions online is with a credit or debit card.

Not just the "big boys"

"I'm just a little guy..."; "I'm a roofing contractor; it doesn't work for me." Wrong and wrong! The internet has levelled the playing field when it comes to size. No longer do you need to be huge to be successful online. And the good news is that anyone can benefit from accepting online payments. The catch phrase is..

Make it easy to pay!

The more ways your customers have to pay, the more likely they will!

1. If people want to pay with a debit or credit card, and you don't offer it, they'll likely go elsewhere.
2. Research has shown that commercial sites can triple their sales just by adding credit card payments.
3. Credit cards attract impulse purchases. It's easier to spend on a card without feeling the guilt factor, and

I spent the last weekend visitng old friends (well, some of them aren't that old!) and family before flying back to the States on Wednesday. It got me to thinking about how important the past really is. I know as kids we all hated visiting the old, crusty relatives, but the past has a great deal to teach us - if we are prepared to bother to learn from it.

It's said that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action, but expecting a different outcome. Even if it's not true for every situation, it very much holds true for website design and, especially, SEO. Unfortunately, with SEO, the goalposts keep moving which doesn't help either. That's why ongoing SEO work is so important. Yes, we must look back (at past results or failures) to be able to plan ongoing strategies, but the SEO "designer" also needs to remain acutely aware of the latest changes and how they will impact current, and future, SEO work.

SEO upholds the old definition of insanity well. It is a constant process of test and measure, test and measure. I, and many others, have said it before... SEO is NEVER on one

Well, it's late on a Thursday night - a little bit late on this entry, but I figure I have a semi-decent excuse... I had a wonderful day seeing my youngest daughter getting married here in Auckland, New Zealand. Despite some threatening weather on Friday, and a less-than-encouraging forecast, the weather behaved well and about 1 minutes drizzle was all the inclemency we got.

Whilst the ceremony went off without a hitch and everyone had a great time, building a good marriage is a lot like doing a good job on SEO. You don't say, "I do!" and then do nothing more. Both partners need to work weekly or daily at building love and care into their relationship. Do nothing for a year and, oh boy!, things just don't run well! Yet so many website owners believe SEO is a one time fix - and that's like leaving a marriage at "I do!"

Ifyou haven't added new content in the last 6 months, or been practicing quality SEO on a monthly basis, then you're leaving your website's "marriage" in dangerous territory.

Better to be late than never?

Depends on what you're talking about. If, like one of my clients, you're into CPR, then the answer is definitely not! However, if it's doing last Saturday's blog (yes, I misssed writing it over the weekend), then it is better to get it done than just leave it out. You'd be surprised just who may be following your little missives!

Today - Monday 06/18 - I'm off to New Zealand for my youngest daughter's wedding. Yet here I sit, all dressed up and nowhere to go, in Sacramento airport waiting for the plane which should have left 10 minutes ago to arrive from Las Vegas. Still they say 7.00pm we'll be airborne to LAX which will still get me there on time for the connection to NZ.

Better late than never can apply to your website too. Whether it's getting one, redesigning an existing one, or coming to realise that just HAVING a website isn't the end of it. It's never too late to start or revisit. So stop putting off doing it - let us do the heavy work for you for a fraction of what most charge, and get you a good

Those who fail to plan...

...plan to fail. I've heard that ever since I started school...errr... a number of years ago! And, I suspect, it's even older than that. I couldn't find out the bibliography for it, but it's actually irrelevant. The fact is if you don't have a destination (a plan) any road will get you there. Men have a justifiably bad reputation of refusing to ask for directions when driving (I have been there so many times!), but so many business owners approach growing their businesses in the same haphazard way (ummm, you DO want your business to grow, right?)

That's your first goal - decide the ultimate end for your business. The Ray Kroc's, Bill Gates's and Steve Jobs's of the business world didn't wake up one morning and decide to build a one shop, small business. The visionaries were just that - visionaries where the end result went far beyond the orginal objectives. We failed to really plan out our first 2 years and it showed. Pretty ho-hum growth, and while it was a good learning and consolidating time, we really wasted much of that time that we could have been aggressively growing the business.

So

To begin with, as we have had in our contracts since we began, SEO is not a science, but an art (or words to that effect). There are definitely known factors which influence ranking - the <Title> tag, <H1> tag (and through H6), bolding text, keywords in the first sentence and a bunch of others.  That's on-page SEO and it's somewhat quantifiable.  I say somewhat, because, with Google, the goal posts are continually moving.  Content "above the fold" is a hot change this year. Many sites have rightly recognised this as prime advertising real estate and jammed it full of ads.  Google says, "No, our surfer came to learn about <search phrase>, why should they be assaulted with ads?"  So these sites have received a penalty.

Off-page SEO is as fluid as on-page. Link farms and link sites were hit hard this year. The traditional reign of back links has been diminished somewhat (though are still important) with more weight going onto social bookmarking.

Magician or artiste?

What is your expectation of your SEO person? Have they set your expectations properly? Do you see them as Merlin, ready to wave a magic wand (knowing all the "inside" secrets), and, "poof",

Or, how to be safe on the Internet

Doing what I do, I come across all manner of passwords from clients.  Some are good passwords, and some are bad passwords - some are SERIOUSLY bad passwords.  There are lots of articles around the 'net telling you what you should and shouldn't use.  For me, what you shouldn't use is a complete no-brainer and takes one sentence, not a whole article.  If you can type it into Google and find it on the 'net DON'T use it!  It's that simple.  So, that includes the really dumb ones like your name, your spouse's name or your kid's or pet's name.  1-2-3-4-5, password, admin or any other password shipped with your equipment.  For bad passwords, that's it.

What is a much better question is, what is a good password?  Another simple answer, one YOU didn't come up with!  It's hard for a human to come up with truly random ones.  When I'm securing websites, I use an online password generator.  There are many of them, and a Google search will get you to one you like.  Include lowercase, uppercase, numbers AND special characters, and, in my opinion, it should be at least 8

Was it ever alive?  I think we can easily answer, "Yes" to the second question.  But why would I ever even consider it is dead?  Recent changes by FB have annoyed many users (and undoubtedly pleased others) myself included.  I like to think I'm pretty tech savvy, but I just don't get FB's new "timeline" layout.  IMHO, they've taken something good and fixed it to broken.  If users are unhappy, you can bet advertisers are hearing the fallout.

This week, car giant GM pulled $10 million in ads from Facebook.  Just a few days later FB was valued at $106 billion - now $10 mil seems pretty inconsequntial.  However, if one giant has seen fit to do this, you can bet others are looking hard at FB's ad model.  Interestingly, GM issued a statement on it's corporate FB pages that hey are still on FB, "like" alll their fans back, and will increase information via FB over the coming months.

So is advertising on FB really that bad?  Studies have shown the click through rate on ads to be a dismal 0.0051% or about 1 in 2000!  Compare this to a CTR on Google Adwords (no friends of mine BTW)

In the first 4 months of this year, Google has rolled out a number of algorithm changes which has changed the face of SEO.  Not that this is new to any of us in the industry - just another frustration to deal with and adjust to.  But, like other major updates, it has changed the way of SEO - again.

What color is your SEO's hat?

Various forms of SEO are referred to by different colored hats.  While I've seen up to 5 or 6 colors described, there are, in my mind, really just 2 - white and black.  I guess you can argue that, if you do a bit of both then you're doing grey hat, however, the possible outcome of you bit of black hat work will result in the same penalties, maybe just a little slower.

White hat SEO

Ethical, by-the-book (the book is written by Google - bear that in mind), no harm no foul SEO.  Google claims it wants to provide the most relevant results to whatever search phrase a surfer enters.  And that's probably where they started.  Now, I believe, they're more about being big business and making a load of money, and one

Here's the final part of clueless mistakes that I see around the web, and are, generally, committed by "professional" designers who should know better.

"Last updated <years ago!>" and out of date content.  Google (and you can bet the others are close behind) is now weighting search results in favor of fresh content according to one of the latest updates.  That means website owners need to be even more vigilant in adding new content, and this makes blogging (points a finger at myself!) something we all need to be doing with even greater frequency.

"Last updated..."

There's nothing wrong with this in itself.  I regularly use it on pages where there is time sensitive material, for example, pricing pages.  Visitors like to know that content displayed on a pricing page is current, and they won't rush to buy the latest blue widget for $9.95 with "FREE shipping", only to find that it's really $29.95 and $5.50 shipping.

Most CMS (Content Management Systems) allow designers the flexibility of showing this information or not.  Alas, some are just too "something" to turn it off.  I have seen sites that have it displayed on every page.  One site in particular (sadly, a web