I‘m very excited to finally launch our Membership and Training site. We did a trial run back in November with a few of you and had some great feedback; now we’ve polished everything up and are ready to launch!

If you are a blogger, do-it-yourself small business owner or web consultant that works with small business owners, The Expand2Web Experts Group is the perfect place to get training and cutting edge support from experts and peers.

We’re starting off with a training course in May called Building and Customizing Your WordPress Website.

This course is the first in a series of training courses that cover:

1. Building And Customizing Your Website
2. Circle of Trust SEO Process
3. Social Media for Small Business
4. Email Marketing
5. Productivity Tools

What I think is really cool about the first course, is that at the end of the 4-week course you will have a fully customized small business website that is SEO’ed to the hilt. We generally sell these websites for $1000 or more.

Membership Site: A Community of Experts and Peers

Along with the training, we are building the premier community of WordPress and Local SEO consultants; people who want to become the best and stay the best at what they do. This includes:

• Member Discussion Forums – You will get full access to our member discussion forums
• Monthly Live Q&A Sessions with WordPress and SEO Experts – You’ll have direct access to Expand2Web WordPress and SEO experts during the training and monthly live Q&A sessions
• Learn from the Experts… Share with Your Peers

We’ve gotten pretty good at this stuff, and feel like we’ve got a lot we can share with you. But we don’t know it all, and that’s why we’re creating a community of experts and peers, and launching comprehensive training courses on exciting, profitable topics like WordPress websites, Local SEO, Social Media and more.

Join Us

We’d love to have you participate in our first class, so try it out, and if for any reason you aren’t satisfied I’ll refund your registration fee no questions asked!

Local SEO features are built into the SmallBiz WordPress Theme to provide a solid foundation for great local search results.

Watch the video for a short tour:

I’ve worked with hundreds of small businesses to help them build a successful web presence, and designed this theme based on my experience working with them. We’re continuing to add more and more out-of-the-box SEO features in each new version.

SEO Features

Here are a few of the SEO features built-in to the latest version of the SmallBiz theme:

• Business Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) on each page
• Customize HTML Title tag, Meta Description and Meta Keywords for each page or post
• hCard Microformats built-in.
• Areas served for nearby cities and neighborhoods (in footer)
• ALT image text
• Map and directions page, with driving directions

With the addition of the SEO Details panel in SmallBiz v1.6, now you can SEO your WordPress website without installing any additional plugins!

SEO Details and Screen Shots

This screenshot of the home page outlines some of the visible features, including the business name, address and phone number in the header, ALT text for images, H2 header tags for titles, and areas served text in the footer.

The SEO Details panel is automatically added to the editing screen for every WordPress Post and Page. You can override your HTML Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords on a page-by-page basis, or take the defaults!

Your Business Address, Name and Phone Number (NAP) is the primary “key” that Google uses to identify that your website is related to your business listing. They are automatically displayed on every page, and easily updated in the SmallBiz Options panel.

Your business information is also encoded as hCard microformat and embedded in your web pages. Google and Yahoo are already crawling and looking for this information and it’s a best practice now to have it embedded on your pages.

We’re excited about this release, and hope you will give it a try!

Need a website? The Expand2Web SmallBiz Theme is a complete small business website theme for WordPress. Click here to watch the video!
 
 

I‘m pleased to announce my new podcast series for small business owners and consultants – The Expand2Web Podcast – has been accepted in iTunes and is now online!

This podcast is designed for business owners and the consultants who help them build their small business websites.

Knowledge is power. And each week I’ll be doing interviews with experts in local search, website design, and small business owners to bring their experience and knowledge direct to you.

Podcast Interview Topics

Here are some of the interview topics I have scheduled so far:

• Getting started with your website
• How to rank well in the Google 10-Pack
• How should offline businesses use Twitter and Facebook for their business?
• How to use the IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) directories to your advantage
• How to use video to improve your search rankings and engage your customers
• How to use Yelp to engage with your customers
• How online reviews affect your rankings, and encourage customers to visit
• How to use an email newsletter to stay in touch with your customers
• Small business success stories (offline businesses who are winning online)
• And many, many more…

I’m interviewing local search experts who know the cutting edge tips and tricks for getting great local search results.

I’m also interviewing small business owners who are leveraging social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and have figured out how to turn their website into a way to attract new customers to their offline business.

Podcast Interview Schedule

I’ll publish a new interview each Friday (10 scheduled so far), so be sure to subscribe and listen in as we dive deep into the world of small business websites and getting great Google search results for your offline business!

What do you want to hear about?

p.s. I’d love to hear your suggestions on topics as well – just let me know what you’d like to learn about in the comments below and I’ll try to get it scheduled.

Imagine being able to sit down at the table with 27 people who spend all day figuring out how Google and Yahoo rank local search results. You can ask them any question about what will help your website rank best in the local search results.

Well, David Mihm has done that for you in his 2nd Annual Local Search Ranking Factors report. He’s surveyed 27 leading local search experts and asked them to rank 49 different factors on their importance in the local search results.

It’s especially interesting to look at the comments that the various contributors wrote by each of the items. I can’t think of anywhere else on the web where you can get so many valuable perspectives on this topic all in one place.

David has also done a nice summary of the findings, and how they’ve changed from last year in this blog post.

I’m excited to be a contributor to the survey this year, and hope that you will find the report as interesting as I do!

WordPress is a great platform for your small business website.

One of the many reasons to use WordPress for your website is because it makes it easy to update your site and publish fresh new content.

Based on requests from many of my clients and readers of this blog, I’m starting a new series of posts and tutorials called “Using WordPress.”

This series will be a little different from the things I usually write about on this blog – building WordPress websites and Local SEO. But I think these tutorials will be very useful for small business owners who recognize how important it is to publish fresh new content regularly to boost your Google search results.

Updating Your Website Should be Easy

Are you able to update your website any time you want? So many people I talk to struggle with this – they have to hire someone to make changes to their site.

Updating your website shouldn’t be hard. If your website is based on a tool like WordPress, you can update it without having to understand HTML and CSS.

All you have to do is get familiar with the rich text editor, which is much like a simpler version of Microsoft Word, and once your site is set up you can publish new content quickly and easily.

Beginner WordPress Topics

With the help of two new authors to this blog – Cindy Wilkinson and David Smith – I’ll help you get up to speed quickly and publishing to your WordPress website with ease. We will cover beginner WordPress topics like:

• Publishing posts and pages in WordPress
• Adding photos, audio and video to your posts
• Saving and returning to draft posts and pages
• Publishing your post at a later date
• Adding a widget to your sidebar
• And many more…

We’ve got over 36 WordPress articles and tutorials planned and being written in this series, so be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can be notified as they are published.

And don’t forget to let me know what you think of the series or individual tutorials – I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below!

Here is the link to the Tutorials: Using WordPress Tutorial Series

Check out a complete small business website theme for WordPress – The Expand2Web SmallBiz WordPress Theme
 
 
 

Small Businesses looking to improve their search results usually don’t think of video first. But Google is “blending” videos in with the traditional search results more and more, and this represents a huge area of opportunity.

How video helps

Forrester did some practical research and testing on this and found that a video has a 50x better chance of appearing on the first page of Google search results than a text web page. (I ran across this article by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land.)

And other studies show that if you have both a text result and a video result on a page, it is 3.3x more likely that the user will click on one of your links!

Based on this research, and what I’ve seen with my clients, video is a great opportunity to improve your search results. Particularly when you are aiming for “local” keywords, where the volume is much lower, this gives you a powerful magnifier.

Creating a video for your business is not as hard as you think

It’s easy to get intimidated and assume that you would need a high production quality video before putting something on the web.

Most of us don’t have those skills. What camera do I use. What video editing tools do I have to learn? It seems like there is a lot know, in order to create a good video that represents your business professionally.

But I learned something very interesting when I was working at Microsoft on a video related project. As part of the technology and platform evangelism team, we did a lot of informal video interviews with Microsoft developers as a way to connect with our developer community.

These videos were impromptu, and shot with a consumer grade video camera. Viewers loved it – they could really connect with and get to know more about the people inside Microsoft making the products they use.

As this project gained momentum, we experimented with higher production value video. Three cameras instead of one. More formal interview and panel settings. And guess what?

Our viewers hated it! They told us they preferred the informal, low budget format. Because it was real. Not like watching TV but more like connecting with the people behind the scenes.

I learned that in this type of setting, people want to see a video that is more like a conversation than a production.

So what kind of video should you make?

For a small business owner, here are a few ideas of what kind of video to make.

1. Create a short 2-3 minute message from the owner. You can even record this on the built-in camera on your computer. Or if you don’t have one, invest $20 in a tripod, find an area at your office with a simple background and good lighting and use your family camcorder. Just introduce yourself and your business, and how you help your customers.
2. Do a short walk-through of your office location. Start out front, and walk through your office and show the viewer around. Show them what it would be like to visit your place of business.
3. Do an interview with the owner or one of your staff. Tell the story of why you started your business, or about one of your favorite customers. Invite viewers to visit your location and meet up in person.

Just pick one of these and get it out there. Remember to keep the video short and personal. Just like you were having a conversation with the viewer.

And you shouldn’t even need to edit the video when you’re done. Just transfer it to your computer and upload it to YouTube.

Tips for optimizing videos for search results

The Forrester post also provides some great tips to optimize your videos for search results:

• Insert keywords into your video filenames.
• Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.) As an example, here is the Expand2Web Video Channel on YouTube.
• Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
• Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
• Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

I’ll share some videos from my small business clients as examples once I get approval from them.

Are you using video to help promote your small business? If you are, let me know how it is working for you in the comments below!

As a companion to the tutorial on How To Install Google Friend Connect To Your WordPress Blog, I’ve created a short video that walks through the steps of installing Friend Connect on a WordPress Blog.

This blog uses the very cool Thesis WordPress Theme, but these steps will work with any Widget enabled theme.

This works for self-hosted WordPress blogs only so far. If your blog is hosted at WordPress.com you won’t be able to install Friend Connect until they come out with a specific widget for it.

Let me know if this is helpful in the comments below, or join using the Friend Connect member gadget on the right hand side of the blog!

So you’ve installed WordPress and plan to use it for your small business website. Now what?

The first step to making your website look like a website for your business instead of a blog is to create a static front page and configure WordPress to use this as your home page.

Normally, when someone visits your WordPress website they will see a list of your latest blog posts. If you are using this for your business website, that may not be what you want on your home page.

Luckily, this is easy to change. Don’t worry, you can still have a page that lists all your blog posts too, if you want to have blog entries or articles on your website.

Create a Static Home Page in WordPress – Step By Step:

After you log into your WordPress Admin, create two WordPress pages.

1) Go to Write -> Page. Name the page ‘Home’ and Publish it.

I also like to turn off Comments and Pings in the settings at the bottom of this page before publishing it.

2) Go to Write -> Page one more time. Name this page ‘Blog’ and Publish it.

3) Now go to Settings -> Reading in your WordPress Admin panel.

4) Change the “Front page displays:” settings to look like this:

A Video Walkthrough

Here is a short video from WordPress.org that walks through these steps:

The End Result – More Like a Website Than a Blog

Once you save these settings with the button at the bottom of the page, you’ll see the page called “Home” as the main page of your blog. You can edit this page to have anything you want in it. You’ll also notice there is a page on the site called ‘Blog’ that shows your blog posts still.

That’s all there is to it! Now you have a custom web page for your website, and you can still link to your blog posts if you want to.

Further Customize Your Home Page With Page Templates

The only problem with the screen above, is that the page title (Home in this case) and the Sidebar still show up on your website. You can remove those also, but you’ll need to create a WordPress ‘custom page template’ to do that. It’s not hard – read this article to see how: How to Create a Custom Page Template in WordPress.

See an Example WordPress Website

If you want to see an example of a complete small business website in WordPress with a customized home page, take a look at the Expand2Web SmallBiz Theme. Click here to watch the video!
 

Take a look what happens if you don’t claim your Google Local listing.

I was doing some research for a client, and found that many Google Local profiles and being pointed to business directories. Take a look at this local search result for “hair salons saratoga,ca”

Notice how the website address for many of the listings is “www.sanjose.com.”

If you click to go to the website for the business, it takes you to a directory page full of advertisements, with no mention of the business you found on Google Local!

It seems that this is happening primarily to businesses who have not claimed their listing in Google. The company that runs this sanjose.com website, Boulevards, appears to be a data provider to Google. Somehow the website for these profiles is getting pointed to the business directory, whether the business owner has a website or not.

If you look at the actual Google profiles for the businesses, they are not claimed by the business owner, and the URL is replaced with the sanjose.com URL.

However, I found that for a friend of mine who owns a local business, they had their proper URL to their website in their Google profile, and it was replaced with the directory URL. I don’t want to disclose this businesses name, but I have screenshots of before and after this occurred.

This is just wrong. Looking into this domain a little bit, it seems to be owned by a company named Boulevards. Perhaps they are managing this portal for the city of San Jose, I can’t tell.

Businesses who have legitimate websites but may not have claimed their Google profile are losing valuable web traffic and giving it away to this unethical web data provider.

Anyone who helps small businesses with local search will tell you to claim your Google Local  profile. See our QuickStart Guide for Local Search for some tips. Here is yet another example of the importance of claiming it.

If you have any information on this, please chime in below or contact me.

Update: This is similar to the floral industry case that Mike Blumenthal blogged about here. But it is a little different, in that it is a city business directory that the profiles get pointed at.

Update #2: After comments from Mike and others, this is different from the hijacking and map spam cases. This may just be Google’s algorithm mistakenly pointing profiles that have not been claimed to what it thinks is an authoritative source.

But either way, this is a very good reason to claim your profile so it doesn’t happen to your business.

I’m publishing more screen casts on Expand2Web now, and really like the Vimeo service. I’ve created a station there, and also at YouTube. So my recent videos, like How To Install WordPress in Five Minutes and How To Get Your Website Visitors to Call You are in YouTube and Vimeo now.

The Vimeo videos are the ones I embedded in the blog posts, because they are higher quality. And YouTube seems to be more friendly with the search engines at the moment.

The Channels

Here is a link to the channels. I hope you will subscribe to one of them – I’ve got a great pipeline of screen cast videos for small business owners coming. Including more tips and tricks for optimizing your Google Local profile, practical tips for using WordPress to manage your small business website, and how to use virtual phone systems like RingCentral to connect with your website visitors and track calls generated from your website. Please subscribe and stay tuned!

	YouTube Channel for Expand2Web
	Vimeo Channel for Expand2Web