You don’t have to be hiding NSA secret documents to feel like you should secure your website from unwanted intruders. PHP built-in encryption/encoding functions let you achieve a very decent level of security to protect your data. The purpose of this post is to explain what kind of data you should secure and how to do so (in a beginner’s programming level).

What kind of data do I need to Secure?

Fortunately you don’t have to encrypt every single data you exchange with your server. The most common secure transmission involves passwords. When a user registers or logs into your site you want to work with data he submitted in an encoded form so that no one (even you!) can read the raw values.

Depending on the type of business you are operating ranking well in local search may be very important. When people are looking for local services such as electricians, plumbers, lawyers, restaurants, etc they will attach a geo-location to their search query. For example, if you are an electrician deserving the Montreal area you will want people who are searching for “electrician in montreal” to land on your website and not your competitor’s website. To make sure this does not happen you have to put some effort into local search marketing.

If you are in the internet marketing business you must know how important it is to measure how well a website or a particular page is performing. Performance can be measured on many bases but in the end it all comes down to conversion rates.

The conversion rate is the "the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators."

Your conversion rate is crucial and you on-page web strategy should aim at maximizing it. This along with proper search engine optimization (SEO) is the key to success.