By Mery Molenaar
CTA Webmaster
February 18, 2015
Now that the 2015 membership renewal period has ended, we are looking forward to a great year with many exciting events. Being a member of the Colorado Interpreters & Translators Association comes with many wonderful benefits for freelance translators and agencies alike.
This year, we are introducing a new feature, a little icing on the cake so to speak. Active CTA members can now download the 2015 Active Member Badge to display on their website or printed materials, such as business cards, flyers, or stationery. Display of the badge will demonstrate your professionalism as a translator or agency and will enhance your business image.
The Membership Badge and Your SEO
Having the membership badge on your website may even create an additional benefit for you, because by including a link with the image you are improving your search engine optimization (SEO). I am far from an expert on SEO, but let me briefly explain what this means.
Search engines, like Google or bing, constantly collect information about every page on the web and create a list of these pages and websites whenever you search for them. Whether your website is listed first or tenth depends on many factors, one of which is whether you have external links on your website and whether others are linking to your website.
SEO ranking is actually far more complicated than this, and there are good links and not-so-good links, but in general, the more people link to your website, the higher your ranking will be.
You Link to Me – I Link to You
Assuming you already have a link to your website from the ‘Contact’ section of your CTA profile, you can improve the search engine ranking for both your website and CTA’s by linking the membership badge to the CTA website (cta-web.org) or your CTA profile page (cta-web.org/member/username). This kind of linking is called reciprocal linking, a mutual link between two websites—you link to me, I link to you.
Reciprocal links will help to increase traffic between CTA’s website and yours. Potential clients visiting your CTA profile will click on the link to go to your website, and vice versa, having a link to your CTA profile from your website provides readers with quick access to your profile information and resume.
So how do you to get this Active Member Badge on your website? There are two ways to go about this:
- I think the easiest way is to download the badge from the CTA logo page (https://citacolorado.org/member-area/cta-logo/) to your computer and then use your favorite website builder or editor program, like WordPress, Wix, or Weebly, to insert the image into your website. Most programs will let you to do this and add a link with little more than a click of a button.
- Another option is to manually add the HTML code provided on the CTA logo page. This code will place the badge on your website and create a link. The single line of code can be cut and pasted straight into the source code of your website. In this case, you do not need to download the badge image first; the code already includes a path to an image hosted on the CTA server. The only thing you need to do after you have pasted the code into your source code is replace the word username in the code with the username of your CTA account.
One final tip when it comes to creating links on your website: Whenever you link to an external website, you want visitors to have access to the external resource, but you do not want to permanently redirect them away from your website. To avoid directing visitors permanently away from your site, make sure your HTML code contains the attribute target=”_blank”. That way, when users click on the link, the linked website will open in a new browser window or tab, while keeping your own website open as well.
