Archive for the ‘SEO Strategies’ Category

Last week I had a new client who has the word Roses in their name.  Though they have nothing to do with flowers or florists Google had them showing up highly for both in Google Maps for their area.

If you have a business name that could cause the search engine for Google local similar confusion, you should check to see if you’re showing up for terms you don’t want to appear for.  One easy way to do this is to go into your Google Local Business Center and see what terms your getting impressions for.  You can also, of course, look at your analytics.

Whent it comes to spam with WordPress and other blogging platforms there are generally two types, trackbacks and comments.

To deal with the trackback spam go to Settings > Discussion and make sure that “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” is unchecked. If someone wants to link to a page or post on the site they can grab the URL and paste it in. Doing this prevents spambots from blitzing your site with trackbacks.

To deal with the comment spam make sure that you have activated Akismet, it’s one of the two plugins that comes with WP by default and it is really good at catching over 90% of the spam. For example, on my blog out of the last 4861 comments I’ve had 4,713 spams caught by Akismet, it let through 148 legitimate comments, and missed only one with an overall accuracy rate of 99.589%. That’s good stuff.

The other plugin I recommend for stopping spam comments is SI Captcha Ani-Spam by Mike Challis. This puts a captcha on the login and/or comments.

I am teaming up with Kelly Hodsdon of Intentional Internet for a six week webinar to teach small business who want and need to attract local clients through the Internet.

Gone are the days when you had to pay $10,000 a year to market in the phone book.  Today nearly everyone is turning to the Internet to look up local businesses.  That makes knowing how to show up where they’re looking absolutely crucial.  Just like the phone book there’s limited space on the first page of listings for your business.  Kelly and I constantly get our clients first page placements and frequently they show up multiple times on the first page of the search results.

In this course we’re going to teach you what very few businesses know.  How to show up in the top 10 of Google local listings.  These listings became much more important when Google started putting them at the top of pages for local based searches.  Now Google’s made them even more important by sticking these listings in the natural search results based on your IP.  For certain results you no longer need to type in your city as a modfier to get local results.  Just typing in plumber or electrican in many locations will get you 10 listings of local businesses and yours should be one of them.

In the six week webinar you’ll get a road map of how to capture great results for your business.  We’ll start with optimizing your site, teach you how to maximize your local listings for the three major search engines, show you additional sites that are worth having a free listing on, show you which social media sites are best suited to local businesses and show you how to track your results.

If you would like to learn more about the course go to LocalSearchAdvantage.com.  We’re severly limiting the number of participant openings because we want to make sure we can give you the attention and support you need, so if you need to build your online presence don’t put off signing up.

Shopping in Today’s Economy, presented by Compete and Google
Wednesday, January 14th at 11:00 am PST – Register to attend the economy has slowed, having an up-to-date perspective on consumer travel demand and preferences is more important than ever. Using an in-depth survey of traveler perspectives and a detailed online behavioral analysis, Google and Compete have partnered to create a new study exploring how consumers are shopping for travel in today’s economy.

Join us on Wednesday, January 14th at 11:00 AM PST to learn:

* How the volume of travel research and booking activity changed as the economy has weakened
* How consumers are shopping for travel differently now than they have in the past, and what implications this has for travel marketers
* Consumer outlook on their plans for travel in the future and how travel sellers can take advantage of this

This webinar will run approximately 45 minutes, followed by a 15-minute Q&A session. Register here.

If you’re using WP-ecommerce shopping cart and you get a fatal error like:
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_option() in /home/somestore/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/gold_cart_files/merchants/authorize.php on line 9
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_option() in /home/somestore/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/gold_cart_files/merchants/paypal_payflowpro.php on line 10
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_option() in /home/somestore/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/gold_cart_files/merchants/bluepay.php on line 9
Try this simple solution: Read the rest of this entry »

This is an ongoing post on trouble shooting WP e-Commerce.  You’ll find solutions here to problems you’re encountering. Read the rest of this entry »

I am shocked by the completely unacceptable behavior of so many designers today that design sites to show up well in Firefox while altogether ignoring Internet Explorer. Read the rest of this entry »