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New website for custom woodworker and cabinet maker Don Ragland of Austin Texas

August 18, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

I enjoy creating websites for small business. These websites provide the business owner a competitive advantage and fairly quickly result in increased business. One of my most recent is a website for Austin, Texas based custom cabinet and furniture maker Don Ragland. Don is a successful craftsman and woodworker creating custom cabinets and furniture in Austin for over 20 years. His marketing was basically the yellow pages. But with dramatic reduction in use of yellow pages (search engines and smart phones have almost replaced yellow pages) and increase in cost of advertising Don had come to realize that he needed a good optimized website in order to be found and reach today’s prospective clients.

Because of the great business results a relative of Don’s has with one of my custom websites, Don asked me to create an effective website for marketing his upscale woodworking. Over a just two week period working with Don, and for much less cost than even a small yellow pages ad, you can now visit the website we created.

Online now for less than a week, we have already gotten the brand new site and domain name in the search indexes. All that is just the beginning of the SEO and search engine marketing that comes with the website.

If you would like to know about the cost and return on investment of my small business websites like Don’s, please call, send an email or leave a comment.

BluDomain mobile and improved SEO with WordPress

August 3, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

When WordPress is added to your BluDomain website, it not just a blog, it also covers the need for site visitors to have mobile and HTML versions. There are even options that can make your WordPress installation way more mobile friendly making sure that smart phone users will always be able to see and use your website. And the SEO advantages of WordPress are well respected, (heck … BluDomain even uses WordPress for the blog on their own website).

WordPress just works! If you like your BluDomain website, it can be even better and give you more reach and visitors with WordPress.

Here are some free plugin resources that can take a WordPress improved BluDomain website mobile -

WPtouch: A simple, powerful and elegant mobile theme for your website. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application.
Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes.

Not only is WordPress fully mobile, it even has free apps to make it easy to edit and update with mobile devices.

WordPress for iOS easily edit your WordPress website with iPhone/iPad.
WordPress for Android easily edit your W0rdPress site from Android smart phones and tablets

WordPress is the best Bludomain add-on. Let me help take your current BluDomain website to the next level of SEO, social networking and mobile accessibility. Just send me and email or leave a comment.

Filed Under: BluDomain, Internet Marketing, SEO, WordPress Tagged With: BluDomain, search engine optimization, search marketing, SEM, SEO, SMO, WordPress

The wholeness of Google+ has the spirit of the moment.

July 13, 2011 by Marc 1 Comment

Or said another way, Google+’s gestalt is the zeitgeist! I think that small business marketers using the web will find competitive advantage through early adoption of Google+. Seems, over the last few months, for there to be a malaise regarding Facebook and since the June 28th’s “release” of Google+ a lot of excitement and evangelism. The “wholeness” approach to Google’s making the web a social network versus using a site as a social network, like Facebook, is new. Although small it is growing exponentially, Google+ is estimated to have now, as of this week, reached 9 million users (according to Search Engine Watch). And perhaps even more telling as to the general spirit swelling around Google+ are the pwns animated gifs like these -

So what can you do now to begin learning and gaining in Google+? Two quick suggestions:

If you haven’t already, sign up for a personal profile Google+ at the Google+ home page. There is also a good Google+ FAQ on that page. I am finding, right now in the limited Beta, that after 10pm PDT is most likely to be successful in signing up.
Add a Google+1 button to your business website. If you have a WordPress based website it is as easy as installing a plugin. I like this one - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-plus-one/. If you haven’t adopted WordPress for your website platform, or want to do it “old school” here is the Google+ code link – http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

Filed Under: Search Engines, Social Networks Tagged With: Facebook, Google, Internet Marketing, SMO, social media, Social Networks, trends

Almost everything you need to know about SEO for search marketing

January 30, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

Once I get the structure and functions of your complete website correct (valid HTML, semantically correct, permissions, sitemaps, indexable domains, blog and galleries together, social media integration, optimal URLs, site speed and much more) then it is all about your content. That is the key to strong online search engine marketing. That is what is important! But how to do it day-to-day after the site is built?

In the below video one of the most respected WordPress SEO gurus, Joost de Valk, explains “Making sure your content is found”. It is 40 minutes long and very well worth every moment of your time.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, SEO Tagged With: Blogs, Internet Marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, search optimization, SEO, SMO, web/blogsites, Websites

Optimizing Facebook Places pages for your business

January 20, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

Facebook Places is a fairly new feature and it works much the same as Google Places. Giving a map, hours, details, even allowing Facebook members to check-in plus more. You can even merge Facebook Places with your Business page, which is wise for some small businesses.

This is how Facebook describes Facebook Places:

“Places is a Facebook mobile application that allows you to see where your friends are and share your physical location. You can check in to nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit. Use Places to experience Facebook in a completely new way by connecting with your friends in the real world.

Facebook Places provides a presence for your business’s physical store locations encouraging your customers to share that they’ve visited your business by “checking in” to your Place. When your customer checks into your Place, these check-in stories can generate powerful, organic impressions in friends’ News Feeds, extending your brand’s reach to new customers. Best of all, it’s free.”

There are reportedly over a million Facebook Places already automatically created for storefront businesses in the North America. With the traffic in Facebook alone it is well worth capturing and integrating Facebook Places with your Facebook Business page, if you have not already.

Here is some information on the how-to.

First step is to see if yours already has been created and claim it.

To find your Place, (from Facebook’s instructions) -

“Your Place may already have been created by Facebook or a Facebook user. To see if your Place already exists, search on www.facebook.com via the Search bar on your computer. If you find your Place, you may proceed through the claim flow on the following page.

Otherwise, you may need to physically be located at your store’s location. Once there, launch Facebook Places using your Facebook for iPhone Application or any HTML5-enabled mobile device via touch.facebook.com. Search nearby Places to find your Place. If you are unable to find it, you may add it by clicking the ‘+’ or Add’ icon.”

Not there? You can Create your Place.

“Creating your Place on Facebook is easy. To add a new Place, enter your Place’s name and description (this can be edited later on). Click add. You have now successfully created your Place and you may check-in.”

Now claim your Facebook Place, this is much the same as it is in Google Places.

Claim your Place as this will allow you to manage your Place’s address, contact information, business hours, profile picture, admins and other settings. Managing a Facebook Place is similar to managing a Facebook Page, but there is additional functionality including maps, directions to the business, and check-ins.

1) Login to www.facebook.com, search for and select the name of your Place. Click on “Is this your business?” to claim your Place.

2) Check the box to declare that you are an official representative.

3) Next, we will attempt to verify your Place by calling the phone number listed for it. Please ensure that you can accept phone calls at the listed number. Click the “Call me now” button. During the call, we will provide you with a 4-digit verification PIN.

4) Enter your 4-digit verification PIN to verify your business. If you don’t receive a phone call, click on the “Call me again” link. Once you’ve verified your Place, you will receive a confirmation message that it has been claimed.

If you have multiple Places to claim, you must go through the claiming process for each of your Places. In addition, a solution for linking multiple Places to a single Facebook Page may become available in the future (emphasis added).

The last step for merging your Place and Business Page is optional and not recommended if you have multiple business locations. That may be changed if the possible solution mentioned above is provided by Facebook in the future. But, if you have only one location and are likely to have only one location for the forseeable future I would merge the pages.

This is what Facebook has to say about the features of a merged page.

“You will be able to manage your business centrally on Facebook if you choose to merge your single Place and Page. This includes posting status updates, photos, and links. Most importantly, all of the people who Liked your Facebook Page will remain connected to your business and you can continue interacting with
them.

Your new merged Page will now be updated with a richer design that includes Place information such as maps and check-ins. Your core Page content – Photos, Videos and Events will remain, as well as any custom tabs. In addition, you will keep your existing vanity URL if applicable.”

There is not much to do proactively for the merge, Facebook will likely prompt you to merge the two if you have both a single Business page and a claimed Place page attached to your Facebook profile record. Facebook recommends the merge upon the following conditions -

1. You are prompted to merge
2. You have just one physical store location
3. You have one Facebook Page representing your business

For more details please review the following resources -

The Facebook Places Help FAQ – http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1159

The Facebook instruction guide, 6 page illustrated pdf – http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Places_advertisers.pdf

Let me know if you have any questions, or need assistance. I feel this is an excellent way to extend your business and website further into social media. Particularly if your site is already integrated and socially enabled. SEO has become much more than just keyword marketing on a webpage. Today it has to include social media. It almost calls for a new term.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, SEO, Social Networks Tagged With: Facebook, maps, marketing, Places, SMO, social media, Social Networks, website marketing

Optimizing Google Places for Local Search Marketing Results

January 16, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

Local search is critical to most of my clients’ businesses. That is how people find many, if not most, of the goods and services they buy. Face it we have used it for years with directories and yellow pages, that is a form of local search. It is easy and appropriate to think of search engine driven local search as the new yellow pages and replacing all kinds of directories. Today’s market uses online search with computers and smart phones. Not so much anymore … phone books.

One of the most quickly effective and productive tactics to boost your local search engine marketing is to improve your Google Places page. This is the listing of a few business with a map locating them that appears at the beginning of many search results initial page. All it takes is time and effort properly applied, to frequently be one of those few businesses when people are searching for what you offer.

If you have not already verified (and captured) your Google Places page do it as soon as you can.

First step, if you not have already done it is to “verify” the Goole Places page for your business. Or if you’re a brand new business you may even need to start the Google Places page for your business.

Here is how you do it. (from this excellent 31 page pdf guide, “Ranking in Google Places” by SEOFactor)

We need to first see if your business is already listed in Google Places. If it is, we need to make sure there aren’t any problems like duplicate listings or incorrect information.

Finding Your Business.

Searching for a Google Places page is simple enough. Simply go to http://maps.google.com and search for the name of your business.

It’s a good idea to search for more than just the business name though. Try your street address and phone number. Also, go ahead and try a few “common” searches one of your customers might make. If you still don’t see any listings for your business, it’s probably not in there.

Google will also do a search for you when you first begin the claiming process, and if they find similar listings they will let you know.

What if You Find Your Business?

If you find a listing for your business, then there are a few things we need to look at. Take a look at all of the information on the listing’s Place page and note any corrections that need to be made. Also, see if there are more listings, and make a note of those as well.

When you’re looking at the Place page, you should see a link in the upper-right corner (almost the exact middle of the screen). The link will either say “Business owner?” or “Owner-verified listing.”

If your listing has the “Business owner?” link, then nobody has claimed ownership of this Place page yet. However, if the page you are looking at has the “Owner-verified listing” link, then somebody claimed that listing. Don’t worry too much. This could just mean that someone in your company has already claimed the listing. Ask around the office to make sure.

If your business was claimed, but not by anyone in your organization, then it means that someone claimed the listing, and not likely for honorable reasons. Take a closer look at the listing, and you may notice that the phone number or website address is incorrect.

No matter. Whether your business has a listing or not, you will soon be taking ownership.

If you didn’t find your listing, then you’ll need to add it to Google directly. Simply go to
http://google.com/places and you will be met with a login screen. If you don’t already have a Google account login, then you’ll have to create a new account.

If you found a listing during your initial search, you just have to click the “Business owner?” link, and the process will continue as normal.

Above are just the first steps in making Google Place provide a competitive advantage for you. For detailed instructions on completing the process and making as good a listing as is possible you should download the guide linked above, or contact me to make your Google Places page as strong as possible and significantly increase your search impressions. I recently increased a clients Google Places search impressions for their product in the Denver area from an average of 300 impressions per month to over 9,000 impressions per month in just two weeks time. If you don’t have the time it is worth the small amount of money to pay an experienced expert for this optimization service. I do this service for each of my website clients.

A final tip. This is not mentioned in the guide but one thing I have found recently that will significantly help boost your placement in Google Places is to offer a special or coupon. There is a link in the Google Places edit screen for the information and duration of the coupon special. Make it timely, relevant to your marketing keywords,of modest duration say 30-60 days and describe if with your marketing keywords. Then change and add new specials every 30-60 days. If you have question about this send me an email.

Bonus – here is another good link that will help you understand Google Places best practices and even a little information about optimizing Yelp for better placement and local marketing of your business.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Search Engines, SEO Tagged With: Google, Google Places, Internet Marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, search optimization, SEO, SMO, Yelp

Whois privacy may hurt your SEO and search marketing

January 12, 2011 by Marc Leave a Comment

Whois privacy, something that many domain name registrars like GoDaddy will try to sell you, but that you probably don’t need, and don’t want As much as domain name registrars will encourage you to make your registration information private and buy their upsell add-on annual fee, I have another view. Unless you have a compelling reason other than spam, I recommend not to do it. Compelling reasons could include a “no outside employment” agreement or perceived social acceptability of your site’s products/offering

As for spam, face it, if you are doing business on the internet with a website you will get spam. There are ways to reduce and fight spam, but be cautious about using domain name privacy to do so.

How might having your domain registration details private hurt? Well it turns out spam and scam websites often do have the registration privacy in-place. (you can reason why) While most legitimate sites don’t. Whois privacy can present a certain type of site profile.

And it is interesting when Matt Cutts (Google anti-spam team leader) was reviewing sites for SEO effectiveness and he had this to say about a HiFi store website:

The HiFi store was fine, but this was another example where someone had 40+ other sites. Having lots of sites isn’t bad, but I’ve mentioned the risk that not all the sites get as much attention as they should. In this case, 1-2 of the sites were stuff like cheap-cheap-(something-related-to-telephone-calling).com. Rather than any real content, most of the pages were pay-per-click (PPC) parked pages, and when I checked the whois on them, they all had “whois privacy protection service” on them. That’s relatively unusual. Having lots of sites isn’t automatically bad, and having PPC sites isn’t automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so.

More directly Jon Glick, former key member of the Yahoo! search team said this about using Whois domain registration privacy:

This is one more potential “flag” that can earn you points to a spam audit. It works well for spammers who are attempting to keep the engines from finding all their sites in one swoop. Those guys are in the business of disposable domains; if you’re not it’s better to avoid this tactic.

So this is one area where you can save money and perhaps help enhance your SEO. Particularly if you put that savings towards a longer domain name registration period.

Filed Under: Search Engines, SEO Tagged With: domain names, Google, search engine optimization, Search Engines, search marketing, search optimization, SEM, SEO, SMO, WHOIS privacy

Replacing a Bludomain splash page with WordPress splash page for better SEO and Search Marketing

January 11, 2011 by Marc 2 Comments

Recently Dapper Images a wedding and portrait photographer located in San Diego asked if and how I would enhance the search engine marketing and SEO with their current Bludomain website located at dapperimages.com and their separate WordPress blog located at dapperimagesblog.com?

new splash page Replacing a Bludomain splash page with WordPress splash page for better SEO and Search Marketing

Dapper Images New WordPress based Bludomain splash page

They wanted to retain a Bludomain type splash page appearance and the basic layout of their blog’s styling. They also wanted a WordPress site that would be easy to customize the styling design with just click and save options.

The Bludomain site was, and is, hosted by Bludomain. The blog was hosted by a separate company on a Windows IIS server (please remember … friends don’t let friends host WordPress on Microsoft servers).

We discussed the tasks, options and prices and got the go ahead to begin the process. The first step was to install WordPress on their Bludomain hosting and then begin to create a WordPress based splash page and move the blog postings/content to dapperimages.com Then begin styling the major changes and minor design adjustments accordingly.

Below is a video review covering some of how the Bludomain splash page was replaced with a WordPress landing page for better site and blog integration and way better SEO and search marketing. Even looks better!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Filed Under: BluDomain, Client Websites, Featured, WordPress Tagged With: blog, BluDomain, search engine optimization, Search Engines, search marketing, SEM, SEO, SMO, Social Networks, Websites, WordPress

How to Import Your Website Blog into Your Facebook Business Page

July 12, 2010 by Marc Leave a Comment

UPDATE: Importing a blog into a Facebook business page is no longer supported by Facebook. Please see this post for more details – You can no longer feed your blog to your Facebook page. To import a blog or other pages from your website you will need to create a custom tab for your Facebook busines page. More on how to do that soon.

- – - – -

Here is the how-to for automatically importing your website’s blog posts onto your Facebook business page. It is not very complicated, but it is not very intuitive either so it made sense to share the instructions in a short video.

As I mention in the video it can take a while before Facebook recognizes your website blog, but be persistent it will work eventually and it is well worth it from both a social media marketing effort as well as enhanced search engine presence. If you have any questions send me an email.

Filed Under: Social Networks, Tools and Tips, WordPress Tagged With: Blogs, blogsites, Facebook, search marketing, SEM, SEO, SMO, social media

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