Randy has been working with me and Thomas on Expand2Web for about a year now. He’s driving a lot of our business development and SEO efforts.

One of the first things he did when we started working together was to take his wife’s business, North Valley Optometry and put it on the map – literally.

When he started, she had no website and zero internet presence. He rolled up both sleeves and used her website as a model while he learned. Now she has a kick-butt WordPress Website, 50+ online reviews and a great footprint on the web. She ranks highly in the Lucky 7-Pack and organic listings for many of her keywords in San Jose, CA – which is a very competitive market. She is also getting new patients every week from the web now.

In this interview I talk with Randy about the things he did for North Valley Optometry. He shares three important tips that any small business owner can follow to improve their local business rankings.

Watch the Video Interview with Randy

You’ll notice that the audio is way quieter for my side of the conversation – I did my best to adjust the tracks and equalize the volume. I know how to fix this for recording the next interview.

Or Listen to the Interview

You can also download the MP3 audio file by clicking the download link below if you’re like me and you listen to interviews on your iPod/iPhone in the car.

“Right Click” here to download the PDF transcript

Please let me know what you think in the comments below!

Monitoring and building Online Reviews is becoming increasingly important to small business owners.

In this Q&A video, Don answers many of the common questions that small business owners have such as:

• Why are online reviews important?
• Where can people leave online reviews?
• What if someone leaves me a bad review?
• How should I ask my customers for online reviews?
• Should I hire someone to create reviews for me?

The free Online Reviews Dashboard tool he mentions in the video is called myReviewsPage.com.

Don, Randy and Thomas built the tool to help their clients monitor and build their online reviews. It allows you to create a dashboard of your online reviews from Google, Yahoo, Bing, CitySearch, Yelp and Foursquare check-ins, and receive email alerts when you get new reviews too.

Take a look, and let us know what you think!

On Tuesday night I was checking my email and got this really nice note from one of my clients. She took the time to make a great video testimonial for me and my SmallBiz WordPress Theme.

Thomas and I work really hard on this theme, and are constantly updating it based on things we learn working with clients, and based on customer feedback.

It’s awesome to get nice feedback like this! I can’t tell you how nice it feels to be surrounded by such thoughtful people.

Thank you Dannah!

Dannah and her husband run a Portland SEO firm specializing in video for small business. You can also check out her great YouTube Channel.

One of the things we get asked a lot is: “How can I show a different sidebar for each page on my website?”

For example, maybe you want to display an email newsletter opt-in form on your home page side bar, but a YouTube Video instead on the photos page sidebar?

The SmallBiz WordPress Theme allows you to specify different widget sidebars depending on the page that is being displayed. This is a pretty powerful way to customize your website without programming.

This video shows you how it’s done:

Let me what you think in the comments below!
-Don

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!

Google Docs, Calendar and other Google services require you to log in to Google. But did you know you can create a Google Account with any email address?

You don’t have to use GMail – you can use your Yahoo email, Hotmail, AOL mail, the email address your Internet provider gave you, or any address to create one.

Video – Create Google Account With Any Email Address

This video shows you how:

This is what the Google login looks like. Just choose the link below the entry fields to create a Google account.

There are a growing number of third party websites using Google Accounts for authentication as well. This means that you can use the same login across all of these services instead of creating a new userid and password for each.

Anyway, I get this question a lot, so I thought I would point it out.

Thoughts? Comments? Did you know this already?

Have you ever wanted to feature your YouTube Channel on your Facebook Page?

I do a lot of video screen-casts and I’ve been looking for a way do do that for Expand2Web for a while.

I tried a few of the apps on Facebook but didn’t really like any of them. So I ended up building a static FBML page just featuring a few videos. But if I wanted to change any of the videos I had to edit the page.

Well just the other day, my good friend – and awesome web designer – Eileen Lonergan showed me this service called Involver. It’s just what I was looking for. It will instantly create a new tab on your Facebook page, allowing you to feature your YouTube channel.

It does a lot of other things too, but this is the one I was looking for, and it’s free.

Here’s a screenshot of my Expand2Web Facebook Fan page, on the YouTube Channel Tab. It allows me to feature my latest video, and also shows the the previous videos too. It changes dynamically as I publish new videos to my Expand2Web YouTube Channel.

What about you – do you have a Facebook Fan Page yet? What apps are you finding the most valuable? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

For home based businesses, businesses that travel to their client’s locations, or for businesses that serve an area outside their city, getting listed properly for those cities in Google Maps has been a challenge.

And if you work out of your house, who wants to show their home address in the Maps listing?

Matt McGee just posted on his blog and on Search Engine Land that Google is testing out a new tool to help solve this problem.

Here is a quick video tour of what the new screens look like in the Google Local Business Center.

And here is a direct link to Matt’s post: Google LBC Adds Tools for Service/Home Businesses

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 just installed the Google Voice extension for Chrome browser, and stumbled on this neat little trick – once installed, it turns any phone number on a web page you are visiting into a click-to-call hyperlink!

When you click it, it will dial that phone number and ring your phone to connect the two of you instantly.

Pretty cool – here’s a short video to show you what I mean.

So what is Google Voice?

Google Voice is a free service that gives you a local phone number. It will route voice mail messages to your email, and even transcribe them to text for you. You can set it up to route calls any way you want; for example, ring your office phone during the day, cell phone at night, or just go straight to voice mail.

Links

Google Voice
Google Chrome browser
Google Voice Extension for Chrome