Just because you have a website for your business doesn’t mean you have branded yourself online. You may even have a web presence and rank for some keywords via the search engines but online branding is much more than that. In order to become a well know brand you must dominate a majority of these seven areas.

Video

One of the best ways to get maximum exposure online is to get a video to go viral. Creating an interesting or funny video can grab the attention of people everywhere. People love to watch videos on Youtube and the funnier the better. One suggestion we give is to create a parody and integrate your product or service. Including your brand name in the title, description and logo at the end of the video. As the video goes viral and spreads your business name and logo can reach further than most advertising can.

Videos are relatively cheap to produce you just need to put your thinking cap on. Once you create a great video you can leverage social media websites to help spread your video.

Social Media

Some people think social media has become the biggest thing since sliced bread and they are right. On the World Wide Web there has never been a better time and better vehicles to promote content. Websites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx and Twitter can become powerful tools to help reach people faster than ever before.

Videos are good but some of the most popular websites launched with interesting articles and graphs and those can work well too. Remember that the content has to be great or your efforts won’t get any traction on the social media websites.

Once you have created great content you will need a Social Media Marketing expert or enthusiast to help promote it. On social media websites like Digg and Reddit if the average person submits great content it’s a waste of time. In order for your content to take off you will need someone that has good connections for each of these websites.

Domain Name

What’s in a name? Everything! If you really want to separate your online business from the millions of others in your niche then you need a name that will stand out. Find yourself a unique domain name that can be branded. Too many online business owners go for name with their main keywords in them.

Example:

www.dogtoys.com

www.webhosting.com

www.shoes.com

While these are some great domain names and can make for gaming the searches engines a little easier, that’s all their good for. If you truly want to build a strong brand online you need to separate yourself from the keyword domain names. It is extremely hard to brand a domain like Shoes.com, as customers will get confused with other websites:

Shoe.com

Shoes.net

Shoes.org

Tips: Domain names are very cheap when you find the right name be sure to purchase as many of the domain extensions as you can. As a general rule of thumb we buy the following extensions; .com, .org, .net, .info, .us, .me and .biz.

Search Engine Rankings

Ranking number one in Google, Yahoo and Bing can help your company become a brand. Often searchers see the first few rankings as market leaders within that specific search. Ranking at the top of the search engines can carry more benefits than just leads and sales. 42% of all searchers click through to the website that is listed at the number one position. Ranking for this gives you much more visibility and free marketing. Bloggers will blog, tweeple (people that use Twitter) will tweet about your website and other webmasters will list you as a resource.

When you’re just starting out, establishing your brand via search engine rankings can be hard to achieve. Most websites will not rank well until after years of trust and lots of organic looking links. You can learn about search engine optimization yourself through places like SEO Book or you can hire a reputable Search Engine Marketing firm.

Adwords / PPC

One of the quickest ways to have a web presence in the search engines is to use Pay-Per-Click Marketing. In PPC you pay to have your website listed in a box market “Sponsors” on the search results pages.

PPC can be used to get your name out there while people are searching for related products or services. If you have a big enough budget you can do what some of the car companies were doing a few years back. A few of the big auto makers made ads and choose every keyword they could. For about a week no matter what you were searching for online you would see an advertisement for their new car.

Communities In Your Niche

In every industry there are a handful of successful blogs and forums. This is where people in your niche are looking for some type on information or like to contribute themselves. These communities are perfect for getting your brand name out there.

Become active as much as you can. If it’s a successful blog you could make useful comments on as many post as you can. This works out best when you are the first person to reply to a blog post. Same thing with community forums, people join these places for help so be helpful.

If you have a decent advertising budget you may want to consider banner advertising. While banner ads don’t convert very well for sales it can however get your name and logo out in the community. Just make sure the banner is in a place where everyone is going to look. Banner ads on the side bar of most website will get ignored by the majority of the readers. Sometimes you can get advertisements within articles or on the center of the page.

Blogging

One of the best ways to create an audience is to give them a reason to keep coming back. Creating a blog on your business domain can increase keep readers coming back over and over again. I recommend you add a blog as a sub-domain or a folder.

Example:

http://blog.yourdomains.com

http://yourdomain.com/blog/

Just starting a blog is not good enough you need to give people a reason to come back often. Ideally if you can schedule blog posts for every day you will have a much better chance of growing your readership. Your goal for your blog should be to become a leader within your industry.

If your content is good it will attract people to talk about you, mention you on their tweets and even blog about you. Creating great content will give you free advertising ever time someone links to your website or mentions a blog post of yours.

Advertising itself is not marketing and building a brand is not a one step process. You will need relentless pursuit of each of these seven steps in order to become a true online brand.

Increased traffic in your blog is desirable right? You crave recognition but when the moment arrives when your articles get slashdotted and dugg, your server inevitably crashes. What your readers get is an error message saying that the website is unavailable. This story has happened a hundred times already such that a name for it was invented. The “Digg effect” has even caused dedicated web accounts to crash majestically.

The pages of most websites today, especially blogs and social networking sites, are generated dynamically using PHP and MySQL. Assembling dynamic content requires more server resources compared to pages based on flat HTML. Fortunately, there are ways to optimize your server so that it uses fewer resources such as:

1. Maintaining a cache of recently created content. Generation of dynamic content is a long process involving database queries and piecing query results with HTML and CSS. If a cache is enabled, what the server passes on to the browser when the same URL is accessed is content consisting of readily accessible HTML. This is good because aside from faster response times when serving HTML pages, server resources are not used to put together dynamic content.
2. Optimizing the design of database tables as well as creating more efficient queries thus lessening the demand on your server’s resources when generating dynamic content. Make sure to index table fields that are used as foreign keys as well as those fields that are part of joins and used in forming query criteria.
3. Making appropriately sized images and using the most acceptable JPEG compression is another effective way of lessening the demand on your server’s resources. If you use images as plain-colored backgrounds, CSS can do this task for you without the cost of reading an image file and positioning it somewhere on your web page. CSS can also tile images such that there is no need to use one huge image to serve as backdrop to your web page
4. Using compression to reduce the size of data transmitted between the server and the reader

Preventing your site from crashing because of traffic surges is actually doable and is being practiced by experienced bloggers and site administrators. As you may have read, some of the tips mentioned are very simple like enabling the cache while others may require more experienced hands such as query optimization.

So the next time your site crashes the tips on this articles might help you solve this problem. If not help is readily available on the web.

About Brent Csutoras

Brent Csutoras is a seasoned Internet Marketing Consultant who primarily specializes in Social Media, Viral Linkbait and Search Engine Marketing strategies. Known for his work on Weird Asia News, a popular website serving a growing audience of around a million unique visitors a month, Brent has built a reputation as a Social Media expert. You can finding him speaking regularly at some of the largest and well known conferences, such as SMX, Pubcon, SES, and InfoPresse.

He has also been mentioned in Forbes.com, interviewed for Entrepreneur.com, and was recently recognized as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Online Marketers of 2008. You can follow Brent on Twitter here.

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Question 1: What did you do before becoming a social media expert and how did you get into social media?

Brent Csutoras: Before I really focused on social media marketing, I was an SEO with a healthcare company, managing a handful of sites. I first starting using social media as a way to build links off their profile pages. It wasn’t until one of my articles hit the front page of Digg, that I realized the amount of exposure it gave my content. I immediately started participating in the top social media sites and building my accounts up so that I could get my content popular more often. Of course, it is important to note that I was not only submitting my own content, but actively submitting tons of sources and being an active member in the community as well.

Brent Csutoras: I think that a good social media expert’s skills depend on their goal really. I don’t think there is necessarily a specific set of skills that make a social media expert, because social media is a very broad term and encompasses a lot of skill sets. When it comes to social media aggregation sites like Digg, then I think that in order to be successful, you need to have many of the same skills you need to be socially successful in real life. I often say that ‘social media online, is the same as social media offline’ and I still believe that very much today.

Online social communities are still social communities, where you need to establish a respect and presence before you will earn respect, authority, and the ability to succeed. You have to make friends, carry conversations, participate on a regular basis, and be in tune to what the current conversation points are. The funny thing is, that is exactly what you have to do in any social gathering in real life as well… go figure.

Brent Csutoras: I am not normally a big fan of social media tools, as the majority of the ‘time saving’ tools are actually automation tools. I have tried hundreds and use almost none of them. There are some tools out there that offer information, such as the Digg Alerter and 97^th Floor’s Social Media Firefox plugin, and EasyTweets, but all in all, I just don’t have much use for social media tools.

Brent Csutoras: I think it again comes down to what you want to define social as, but there are always a lot of people who call themselves an expert, and seldom are they ever experts. I think the term expert is something that other people say about you and not something you should have to say about yourself.

Brent Csutoras: If you really want to stand out and receive recognition for being an accomplished (expert is a pretty strong word) social media marketer, then you need to be involved in the conversation. You need to blog, network, attend conferences, get involved with the social community sites, and be a leader. I would also really recommend you read an old article I wrote that still applies today called “I know it is social, but STFU already!” and there is a whiteboard we did here.

Brent Csutoras: It depends on your goal of course, but I would say Digg is still the best site out there for promoting content in social media. Of course, with it being one of the best sites, your content also has to be really good to reach the popular section of their site. StumbleUpon has really exploded and grown so dramatically this year and it is a little easier to promote more niche stuff since it is tag based. Twitter is a great platform for getting the message out as well. Those are the top sites right now for me.

Brent Csutoras: The best tip I can give you is to really go the extra mile when creating content for social media. You need to be creative, interesting, comprehensive, and unique with the way you write your content. Success does not come from writing good content, it comes from writing great content at the right time. You need an angle for your content, yet still keep it general and viral in nature, so being involved in the community and the industry you are writing about will allow you to see the angles that will lead to success.

Use images and line breaks, to separate content and make it easier to digest. Don’t clutter your page with ads or other distractions, and most importantly… don’t try to convert the first wave of social media traffic that comes to your content.

Brent Csutoras: Put all the tricks aside and spend your time making real connections. Those are the people that are going to give you the natural and diverse Diggs you need to be successful.

Brent Csutoras: First, it has a lot to do with the audience group. Reddit is not as main stream so its users are much more internet savvy and not so easily appeased with mediocre content. Like any site out there, you need to spend time on the site and learn what the overall community likes and dislikes. A lot of people use Reddit for social media marketing, but not as a real user, like they do on Digg.

Second, Reddit has some huge moderation problems that are better defined by reading Reddit’s Decline in Democracy,  which I wrote after going back and forth with Reddit’s cofounder Alexis for months attempting to suggest solutions and fix their moderation issues. The problem is that Reddit does not share the concerns and figures anyone with a complaint about the way it works is a spammer, in most cases.

Brent Csutoras: Digg) There is a minor level of moderation at Digg that they should stop using. It is very clear that certain domains become penalized and never have a shot at the front page and sometimes content makes it into the Top 10 in Upcoming for over 12 hours and never goes popular. All in all, I am pretty happy with Digg though.

StumbleUpon) They need to allow you to flush all the pages in queue that were sent to you by your friends. They can add up and keep you from being able to Stumble completely new content.

Reddit) They need to take the power back from the handful of private subReddit admins who take up 50% of the front page of Reddit. They are not bound by any TOS and can moderate how they see fit, which has been proven to be very personal and not related to content submitted at times.

Brent Csutoras: Trying to spam and self promote their content without making an effort to participate in the community. Again, the same rules apply for fitting into a real social community offline. If you go in talking about me me me, no one will want to talk to you. So take the time to learn the community and become friends with its users before you attempt to promote your own content.

Brent Csutoras: If nothing else, register your name immediately to keep someone else from using your name to their benefit. Twitter is one of the fastest growing social media communities where it is ok to self promote, since your followers opt into seeing your messages. I would recommend having a real presence and not completely automating your account, but you have a great opportunity to get feedback, reach new customers, and get your message out through Twitter.

Brent Csutoras: Hah… There goes that expert word. I like what I do and I am passionate about social media, but there are many people way smarter than myself. Take Chris Winfield for instance, who is probably one of the smartest social media marketers I have met. He is constantly teaching me new things and pointing out angles I had never even thought of before. Same with Todd Malicoat who has a ton of affiliate and SEO background that helps change the way he approaches social media. Dave Snyder and Tony Adam are really breaking ground on how to measure success and use the feedback you get from your social campaigns to learn and improve. Greg Finn is my go to guy for social media content and what is going to be viral or not. The list goes on and on, and I am sure to have forgot some people.

I am honored just to be in an industry that is so new, exciting, and beneficial to online marketing in general.

No matter where you go on the net, you will hear the phrase, “Content is king”. Traffic is important of course, but what is keeping them on your page? What is the reason they come back? It isn’t the pretty graphics and cool little advertisements you have going on. What it all comes down to is the connection they feel with the subject, and the writer that is producing it.

Whether you are a website owner trying to provide higher quality content to your readers, or you are a content producer trying to gain new prospects through better quality, you can gain something from here. Long sentence, I know, but I had to incorporate everyone. Just keep in mind that you are here to learn, and you have to put your own spin on things to really become original. Anyone can copy and rewrite, but creating your own brand and personality is where the readership will follow.

So what’s the hold up? Get to the good stuff.

To start, you have to always keep your audience in mind. You need to engage the reader and make your content different from any other person that writes on the same topic. If the average reader is a certain age group, education level, or has a certain level of experience, make sure to target them in your writing. Also, keep all of your writing consistent. Inconsistency will give your readers the impression that your organization skills are nonexistent and will encourage them to stop reading before the end.

You know who your readers are, so now you have to know what they are doing there. What is the point of your content? Seems like a simple question, but often times writers don’t really think about what their writing will do. Are you here to inform? Maybe you are reviewing and selling a product. Whatever the case may be, get into the readers mind set and give them what they want. If they came to you to find out the best casserole recipe, then by God at the end of it they better know which the best is. Inform when appropriate, sell when necessary, and always entertain. No matter how serious the subject material, make sure the reader feels connected to your views, and enjoyed what you had to say.

Now that you have the right mindset, it is time to get into how to write. Try to use bold words when necessary, italicize to emphasize certain parts, and underline accordingly. These action points can increase readers attention, and create a better flow overall. Don’t overdo it! Like anything in life, a little taste can be good, but too much can really put off the average reader.

It’s time to become a real life person.

Hopefully you have a personality at this point in your life. If not, I can sell you one for $24.99, plus shipping and handling. Too steep a price? Alright, I will let you in on a little taste for free. Giving your writing personality is as easy as adding your two cents where appropriate. You don’t always have to have something witty and humorous to say. Just say something that tells the reader, “OK, this is a real person writing this”.

Let’s say you have to write about an acne product. The target audience is in their late teens, early twenties. Desperate for a solution to their problem, they happen upon your website. They already know what the product is supposed to do, how it does it, and what they can expect from purchasing it. Simply stating those facts will have the reader running for true insight. Here is where you have to add a little personal touch.

If you are trying to keep it as professional as possible, avoid a story and state a simple fact that has improved your life. “Other so called acne solutions have always left skin peeling, red glaring examples of their inability to work on my face. With so and so product, no redness or irritation occurred, and I could vibe out to the latest club banger without fear of being seen“. This will create an instant connection to you and the material.

As long as you are capable of coming across with some kind of personal insight, people will instinctively listen to what you have to say. Add some flare, make a joke, and give some personal enlightenment that you recently achieved. Continue to sharpen your writing skills and you will soon have no problem keeping the audience happy.

There is no shortage of tools and resources to help web designers work better and more efficiently. Unfortunately the best of these tools can be difficult to find. Here are some my top picks, divided into the essential categories of web design and development.

Colors and Fonts

Depending on the site, the choice of colors and fonts can portray as much about it as its text. While you may, or may not, already be an expert in color theory or typography, the following tools can still help you make good design choices:

Adobe Kuler – Find, create, and modify color schemes
Font Squirrel – Large free font collection, allows commercial uses
WhatTheFont – Automatically identify fonts
Typetester – Compare fonts, side by side
sIFR – Use non-standard fonts on sites, without breaking compatibility

Graphics and Icons

Graphics, from logos to interface icons, are both an effective way to provide the user with information, and add to a design. The following resources can help with the graphic design process, or are ready-to-use openly licensed graphics:

stock.xchng – Free Stock Photography
Silk Icons – Popular free 16×16 icons
IconBuffet – Swap icons with other users
Vecteezy – Free collection of vectors
Liquidcity – Vector icon collection, designed for websites

Coding and Testing

Now that your design is shaping up, it’s time to begin coding and testing. The following tools can help you code, find bugs, and cross-browser test efficiently:

Spiffy Corners – Purely CSS Rounded Corners
Browsershots – See your page as it appears in dozens of browsers
W3C Quality Assurance Tools – Find coding errors, broken links, etc
Web Developer – A Firefox addon with many essential design tools
Firebug – Another Firefox addon, which aides in debugging
HTML Tidy Online – Automatically clean up your HTML source

AJAX was, and remains, the hottest buzzword in web development. This will continue to hold true for the foreseeable future, and for good reason; sites which use it are pretty slick. Yet the acronym, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, continues to be misused and misplaced. Have you made one of these all-too-common mistakes?

1) I Need an AJAX Guru to Code an AJAX Website

Any proficient JavaScript coder can use AJAX. The fact of the matter is, every function of an AJAX powered site is standard JavaScript. An AJAX site simply uses XmlHttpRequest() to send and receive server requests. In fact the acronym itself, while catchy, is an all-around misnomer. The techniques commonly thought of as AJAX require neither the returned data to be XML, nor the requests to be asynchronous (although they can be both).

2) AJAX is New

AJAX, the acronym, is new. The term was coined in 2005. The technology behind AJAX is not new. JavaScript has been part of the Internet since the 1990s. A method to request data through JavaScript has been in browsers as early as IE5.

3) AJAX Powered Websites are Fast

Properly implemented, AJAX can make site navigation much faster for the end-user. Having the browser refresh and render a page takes a lot of time. Preventing this, by requesting and updating only portions of the page, is very efficient. However, without a good implementation or proper infrastructure, AJAX can bring your server to a stand still with excess or unnecessary requests.

4) I need to add AJAX to my website to keep up with the times

Is this true? It depends entirely on your site. While sites from Google to Facebook use AJAX successfully, many others simply do not. If you decide that your site could benefit from AJAX, ideally a site with very dynamic content, design your implementation carefully. Keep in mind that your site must degrade properly if JavaScript isn’t available. Make sure key content remains linkable and accessible. Not only could you risk having frustrated users, you could give search bots nothing to see.

5) AJAX Will Replace Flash

While it’s true that Flash was once the buzzword that AJAX now is in web development circles, the idea that AJAX will replace completely flash is unfounded. While entirely flash based designs are becoming increasingly uncommon, flash still serves a purpose for many multimedia and graphical interface elements.

While AJAX has given many great possibilities in web development, consider the technology carefully before implementing it on your own site. Don’t break the likability, accessibility or navigation (back/forward buttons) of a site just to use AJAX. Use it where it is the most efficient way to make something work.

Facebook can be fairly easy to use as a tool to increase your brand awareness.  Almost anyone can do it but it helps if you have some experience in networking.  It may take time for you to see results, but if you are persistent, you can acquire a nice following and you will soon be able to jump start numerous successful groups.

Facebook is very simple and allows you to separate friends by groups.  When you start a new group in three clicks you will be able to invite all of those friends most likely to be interested in what your new group is about.  Below are seven great tips on how to market your company using a Facebook Group.

1) Increase Your Friends

It’s pretty hard to tell people about your company if you have no one to tell.   Add at least 100 people you either know or would like to know.  Try and find people that will be interested in the group(s) you may start on Facebook.  It’s a waste of time to seek people out that don’t have similar interests.  Stay focused on adding friends that will want to interact in conversations that your interested in.  For example if you are trying to increase brand awareness for an organic foods company you will probably seek out people with healthy lifestyles and similar interests.

2) Starting a Group

When you start a group the first rule of thumb is the group needs to look full and alive.  Upload pictures, videos and start topics and discuss.  Get a few of your friends to help add to the discussion and post their own questions and content to keep the group going.

Ask a question here and there in the main body of the group and do not hesitate to link to articles on the bottom. The articles should link to informative websites in the industry or your own.  If you manage to write good content on your blog, this is the ideal place to promote new posts.

3) Quality Content

Now that you have a Facebook group started you need to keep quality content and a strong message.  People often join groups on Facebook but then rarely go back to interact with the group.  They may read what’s going on but the reason why they don’t come back, is the lack of quality content.  If you keep the producing quality content, others will see what is going on and this will bring in new members.

4) Moderate Your Group

Do not bombard the members with senseless newsletters or spam.  Someone we know sends out a monthly newsletter that is nothing more than a recap of his blog.  (lame)  Why would I want the information twice?  Wait for something newsworthy or create “how to” articles that people will enjoy and get value out of.   When you create this quality content you can often slip in some mentions of your brand.

5) Networking with Moderators of Larger Groups

Networking with the owners of the biggest groups in your niche or a similar niche can really add value.  If you can do anything of cross promotional together it can help both groups grow, especially the smaller group.  Doing so often can take time to establish a quality relationship with such moderators but you will often get out what you put in.

6) Quality Conversations

Have quality conversations. When a friend has some post you can get in on, then do not hesitate to shine with knowledge, input, and opinion or a questions. You cannot be shy. You need to let them realize that you are a qualified and knowledgeable person and people will be interested in joining your groups and checking out your site.

7) Be Social & Tell Everyone About Your Group(s)

Tell friends about your group, in fact tell anyone who might be interested.  Some of the best ways are to invite people via Facebook and use Twitter to tell others about your group.  A group will really grow when friends from all angles meet.  I always say, once those you know are connecting there and start bringing in fresh blood, your group or community is going to be on autopilot and you will not be needed unless you decide to come in and add something that you believe is going to shine the limelight on your network.

I know everyone in their mother has a list of good FireFox add-ons but I would like to share the top 7 FireFox Add-ons that we use here at McKremie.com.  We deal with DNS issues, mutliple websites, and other issues and these add-ons really save us tons of time.  We all have our favorites and these are in no puticulare order.  This list complments the social media tools that will make life easier, if you haven’t checked them out have a look.

1) ShowIP

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/590

Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom information services by IP (right mouse button) and hostname (left mouse button), like whois, netcraft. Additionally you can copy the IP address to the clipboard.  This is very helpful for anyone that works with DNS issues or SEO.  It is by far the most effient way to get the websites IP address without having to run a look-up.

2) SEO ToolBar by SEO Book

http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/

SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.  Inlcudes information about Google PageRank, website age pulled from Archive.org, Yahoo! linkdomain information, number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us, Technorati information, ALexa Information, directory listings and whois information. 

3) Domain Details

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2166

This one overlaps with a few of the others but has some great functions.  Displays Server Type, Headers, IP Address, Location Flag, and links to Whois Reports.

4) Screengrab

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146

It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame, basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.  This add-on will save you so much time if you don’t have it you are really missing out.  With this add-on you can grab screenshots or pictures within secounds.

5) Social Media for Firefox

URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7888

6) Update Scanner

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3362

Monitors web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds. This tool is great for following compeditors and catching when a website changes their homepage.
You can select how often each site will be scanned and minor changes can be ignored, like date, time and whatnot.

7) User Agent Switcher

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.  View the current page as in a different browser (IE, Opera, NetScape). This comes in handy when you want to check for Cross Browser Compatibility issues.

An intro to CAPTCHAs

Captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. You’ll likely recognize them as Security Images, a series of random letters or numbers, which you have to enter when sending data on most websites. This verifies that you are a human, and not a robot entering data automatically, such as a spam bot.

Captchas aren’t perfect; a spammer can still solve a captcha manually, and software may be created to solve specific captchas to varying degrees of success, but they are still essential for modern websites. They help to dramatically reduce spam and false form entries. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to make a unique captcha with PHP and GD.

Designing a Captcha

GD is a powerful graphics library for PHP. Good hosting providers will have this library installed by default. To start off we’ll want to create an image based on a background that provides some interference for optical character reading (OCR) software, but not enough to cause difficulty for humans. The following 4 backgrounds will be used in this example:

Secondly, a unique truetype font (TTF) should be chosen. Although this tutorial will use a simple sans-serif font, feel free to look for something more interesting.

Finally, a character set must be chosen. Some prefer a combination of letter and numbers, or each individually. Either way, characters that resemble others should be avoided.

Once you have these key elements chosen, you’ll want the script to generate and display a random string which will be saved in a session. The displayed string should be altered to make it more difficult for software to recognize the characters.

Putting it Together

With your captcha planned, it’s time to put it into code. The following will begin to create your image from a random PNG background, as well as setup variables such as the font and security string:

ob_start();
session_start();

$im = ImageCreateFromPNG(mt_rand(1, 4).”.png”);

$chars = array(’a’,’b’,’c’,’d’,’e’,’f’,’g’,’h’,’i’,’j’,’k’,’m’,’n’,’p’,’q’,’r’,’t’,’u’,’v’,’w’,’x’,’y’,’z’,’2?,’3?,’4?,’6?,’7?,’8?,’9?);
$str1 = $chars[mt_rand(0, count($chars)-1)];
$str2 = $chars[mt_rand(0, count($chars)-1)];
$str3 = $chars[mt_rand(0, count($chars)-1)];
$str4 = $chars[mt_rand(0, count($chars)-1)];

$font = “font.ttf”;
$size = mt_rand(13, 16);

$_SESSION['captcha'] = $str1.$str2.$str3.$str4;

The code below is slightly more complicated, as it outputs the text at a random angle, and slightly different positions/colors. You’ll likely want to play with the output parameters.

$angle = mt_rand(-5, 5);
$color = ImageColorAllocate($im, mt_rand(0, 100), mt_rand(0, 100), mt_rand(0, 100));
$textsize = imagettfbbox($size, $angle, $font, $textstr);
$twidth = abs($textsize[2]-$textsize[0]);
$theight = abs($textsize[5]-$textsize[3]);
$x = mt_rand(5, 10);
$y = mt_rand(15,18);
ImageTTFText($im, $size, $angle, $x, $y, $color, $font, $str1);
ImageTTFText($im, $size, $angle, $x+mt_rand(20, 25), $y+mt_rand(1, 3), $color, $font, $str2);
ImageTTFText($im, $size, $angle, $x+mt_rand(45, 50), $y+mt_rand(1, 3), $color, $font, $str3);
ImageTTFText($im, $size, $angle, $x+mt_rand(65, 70), $y+mt_rand(1, 3), $color, $font, $str4);

Finally, we’ll have the following code output our finalized image.

header(”Content-Type: image/png”);
ImagePNG($im);
ob_end_flush();
imagedestroy($im);

Integrating The Final Product

The code above should output something like the following (refresh to see another):

The text in the captcha is stored in a PHP session. This can be accessed in your scripts using the global variable $_SESSION['captcha']. Be sure to call session_start(); at the start of your script first.

Further Considerations/References

To strengthen your captcha further, look into some of the many functions GD has: GD Reference. A great place to find many free fonts is UrbanFonts.com or DaFont.com

Feel free to use the code above as you see fit. It has been released as GPL v2 as part of an open source project that I worked on. The background images are also free to use, however I would recommend creating your own.