Wes Cutshall

If you’re going to own and operate a successful website you need to become familiar with the acronym SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of designing and/or tweaking your website so that the search engines know what your website content is about. The idea is to specifically tell engines like Google what content is on your site so that your website shows up when users query search engines for your targeted keywords. Some might also say that you are quietly suggesting to the search engines what keywords your website should show up for. Unlike the early years of the Internet, search engines no longer rely on META tag data for indexing websites. It’s the structure and makeup of your content that tells Google what your website is about. If you follow a few tips you can help to suggest to Google, and other engines, what keywords it should rank your website highly for. This will result in your website showing up higher in the results for your targeted keywords. These tips were gathered from months of reading both SEO forums and SEO articles online. We will use FidoFinder.com as an example in some of the suggestions to help explain the tips.

Title

The HTML title of each individual web page needs to contain your keywords. Many websites simply include the name of their website in their HTML title tags across the website. You need to also include your targeted keywords, in a natural manner, in your title tags. Be sure to modify every web page’s title tag to represent the content of that page. A good example is Fido Finder’s web page titles including the keyword “lost dogs” and “found dogs” in their titles. The individual dog profile pages include the dog’s breed and location in the title.

URL

The actual text that makes up your URL needs to contain your keywords. If your domain name itself does not contain your keywords make sure you name your pages in a manner that keywords are included in them. On Fido Finder the “lost dogs” search page is named “lost-dogs.php” instead of “search.php.” It is widely believed that dashes are the best way to break up words in a URL as Google will consider lost-dogs to equal “lost dogs” but lost_dogs to equal “lost_dogs”.

Internal Links

Links within your own website should contain your keywords. Instead of using links with anchor text like “click here” be sure to actually use your keywords in the anchor text. On Fido Finder links within a paragraph urging a visitor to register their lost dog use “register your lost dog” as the anchor text instead of linking text like “click here to register.” Use your keywords as links throughout the site, it is good to have 2-3 of the same keywords in links on the same page. Text links are better than image links. If you use images for your site navigation be sure to include ALT text for the images so that search engines can tell what the image links represent.

Inbound Links

If you have control, it is best to have links to your website from external domains that include your keywords. On Fido Finder we employ the use of a tagline (Where Lost Dogs are Found) in our website identity that includes our keywords to help to encourage webmasters to link to our site using our keywords. So webmasters tend to create links that use “Fido Finder – Where Lost Dogs are Found” as the anchor text – which helps to tell Google that Fido Finder is about “lost dogs.” Most developers believe that the number of inbound links with your keyword is the number one most important factor in your position in Google’s search engine results.

Heading Tags

Be sure to actually use H1/H2/H3 tags for headings of your page and include your keywords in these tags. You can use CSS to style the headings tags so that they don’t act quite as ridiculous (padding, etc) as the HTML specifications dictate. It is believed that Google looks for these tags and gives them weight when indexing a website.

Bold Text

Use the HTML bold tag around keywords within the text of your website. Again, it’s believed that Google looks for bold text to help determine important parts of a website.

Keyword Saturation

Be sure to use your keywords multiple times on your web pages. Don’t overdo it, but be sure to repeat your keywords on your site. On Fido Finder we continue to use the terms “lost dogs” and “found dogs” in places where we would more naturally just use the term “dogs.” But we want Google to be 100% sure that our site is not just about dogs, but lost and found dogs.

History

I’ve been using PayPal Payments Pro for a few years on my sites. Payments Pro allows you to access a PayPal API so that you can accept credit card payments directly on your site without your users visiting, or even knowing that you use, PayPal. The API is pretty cool and very easy to use. PayPal’s documentation is also very good. I’ve got it set up on our PHP sites and we accept payments, submit refunds, and send money all through the API.

Problem

The problem that I’ve run into is that PayPal only allows you to submit one business name on your credit card transactions. If you run multiple sites through the same API / PayPal account they will all show the same name. And I will tell you that no matter what you do, you will get phone calls asking who you are and why you charged customers’ credit cards. We had notices on the site, the buttons actually read “make payment to 32nd Degree”, and we explained that the credit card statement would show “32nd Degree” as the payee in the email receipt, but people still forget. This can also lead to increased credit card chargebacks, which are a pain. You cannot create multiple PayPal accounts linked to your business bank account, so you can’t simply open new accounts for each website.

I called PayPal about two years ago and was told that there was simply no solution for running multiple websites and having each website name on credit card statements, at least not with only one business bank account to move money to. I recently Googled my problem and found on a forum that PayPal had finally come up with a solution to this problem.

Solution

You can request a parent-child relationship between two or more accounts with PayPal. You can create a pay@childwebsite.com account that links to pay@parentcompany.com. The money will be “swept” each night from the child account into the parent account. For some reason PayPal also sets the parent account to automatically transfer your parent account balance to your bank account each night. I requested this to be turned off on my account today, hopefully it works. You will have to apply and pay for Payments Pro on the child accounts, for whatever reason. I was told by PayPal that I would be paying the Payments Pro fee on each child account I wanted to create. From what I’ve seen, though, only my parent account has been charged this fee, just like before I created the child accounts.

The Catch

Now here’s the catch. PayPal doesn’t allow you to open up multiple accounts with the same credit card (the “funding source”). I only have one business credit card. But, once you set up a child account, and use a personal credit card as the funding source, you can remove that credit card if the account is linked to a parent account. This account will adopt the parents funding source, so that your Payments Pro payments can still go through successfully. But, you’re forced to register with a unique credit card, there is no way around this.

So the steps to set up a child account are:

1. Create a new account with something like pay@childwebsite.com
2. Apply for Payments Pro – be sure to enter your child account info in the line for the credit card statement so that your website name shows up on people’s credit card statements. You can enter your business name up top, but at the bottom of the form be sure to put your website name.
3. Once you are approved for Payments Pro, you will get an email, call PayPal and ask for them to set up a parent-child relationship for your two accounts. You’ll be transferred a few times before you get to the right group that can do this. Actually they can only submit the request for you. You will receive an (vague) email once the accounts are linked. Try to get the person’s contact info who submits your request, you might need to contact them later.
4. When the account is linked you can remove the credit card from your child account. You’ll want to do this if you want to use this credit card on another child account registration.
5. Sign up for your API usage within your PayPal account and change your website code to use the new username / password / certificate.

Another Catch

Something to consider, since your child accounts will be sweeping their funds to the parent account each night your child accounts will be empty, or barely funded, most of the time. For me this affected my API code for issuing refunds – since when I ran the code the accounts were empty. Since in my case I did not have multiple credit cards for the same bank account sitting around my child accounts had no funding source after I deleted the card I used to get registered.  But, I was able to instantly transfer funds from the parent account through the API and then make the refund (I had to put in a 30 second wait between transfer and refund). Now I just have to modify all of my refund code to make this transfer first.

Obfuscation, it’s not just a fun word…it’s useful! Every once in a while you do something that is so simple, yet so valuable, that it just makes you feel good – like you actually did something complicated and are reaping the rewards. Today I had the need to obfuscate some JavaScript and I found this online JavaScript obfuscation tool. I had tried one already and it had failed to work with my code, but this one worked like a charm. It is possible to de-obfuscate obfuscated code, but the casual HTML coder won’t even understand what they’re looking at. You’re preventing a person from looking at your HTML and saying, “Hey, this is nice, I can use this!” but not preventing someone from deciding to copy your site outright.