We all know that one of the keys to great SEO is making sure you keep your website updated, new and fresh. Whether you do this with a blog, or you change your homepage with new offers, coupons or new products, it serves to show Google that your site is “alive.” For many small businesses in particular, this is a real challenge. But what exactly are they?

QR Codes, Connecting Consumers and Products

They come to us from Japan where they are very common. QR is short for Quick Response (they can be read quickly by a smartphone). They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone. You may soon see QR Codes in a magazine advert, on a billboard, a web page or even on someone’s t-shirt. You can perceive QR codes as being augmented reality apps.

Once it is in your smartphone or feature phone, it may give you details about that business (allowing users to search for nearby locations), or details about the person wearing the t-shirt, show you a URL which you can click to see a trailer for a movie, or it may give you a coupon which you can use in a local outlet. Most of the QR codes found in current advertising are an absolute waste of time. I personally tested over 200 random QR codes I saw in advertising for this article, and it was a wake-up call to how absolutely uncreative agencies and brands have become.

And I say “agencies and brands” because it’s really not the QR codes fault: A QR code is a tool, nothing more, and it is a poor marketer who blames the tool. The vast majority of those I scanned landed me on a webpage that was the same URL as in the ad itself. That is about as useful as telling someone your name while wearing a name tag. There was a time when QR codes for marketers had more promise; when phones were not all decked out with keyboards.

Everyone hated predictive text input on the standard dumb-phones, especially if you had to type in a URL. It was just too difficult to type anything substantial. But then there was another issue: Why bother shooting a QR code with those dumb-phones when their browsers sucked?

Bottom line: It looks like QR codes are not understood by anyone outside of the most geeky people on the planet. It’s not easy to use QR codes because the built-in camera applications on the major mobile devices do not read QR codes. Until QR codes are supported by the default camera applications on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Nokia, QR codes will remain as background static.