What does this mean for you?

With local search starting to dominate Google rankings, you can claim another spot on the first page besides your Google place listing and your own small business website. Even a few percent increases in visitors to your Facebook can translate into thousands and thousands of dollars of increased sales over the lifetime of each customer.

Follow these steps to optimize your fan page and you may well be able to grab another on the first page.

1. Keep the Page Fresh: Every time you post a wall update, add new photos, events or discussions, the search engines will come back to your page to index or add the content to their available listings.
2. Get More Likes: The more ‘likes’ you makes Google think others will like it also.
3. Related Content: If you have a restaurant, Google expects content on your site to be about food, your restaurant and cooking. Keep your page content related to your business.. Use local search terms or keywords in your posts. An example in the restaurant market would be, “Come visit the best Italian restaurant in Aurora tonight for half priced appetizers from 4-7 pm.”
4. Facebook Website Address: Have the URL or address display the city name and business name/market instead of the ugly default address Facebook provides. As example: http://facebook.com/aurorapizzamamaallottas/
5. Facebook Shares: The more people share your page it with their friends helps to push your rankings up. Google sees this as you having great content.
6. Facebook Page Age: Google gives trust related to the age factor of the page. Not much you can do about this one except make sure you have the other 5 factors optimized correctly and you can outrank older fan pages.

Facebook gives you the great ability to communicate with your customers and be interactive which increases loyalty, sales and customer frequency. More and more small businesses have been turning to Facebook to increase sales and take business away from their competition. Take advantage of these tips today and enjoy the benefits and sales for years to come.

What we’ve done with this information

I just setup a new business page (fan page) called LaCrosseWebDesign.  I say business page, but it actually is actually more fun than business. We wanted to create something you would find useful. You should check it out now to see what I mean.

Click here to view the live site.

This was a fun project, and I want to personally thank Michael Schieber, Riverfest President, and John Kockler, Riverfest Secretary, for selecting Bernadot Studios for this project.  We had a lot fun building it and we put this site together in just under a week. Lots of late nights and coffee for me, but I think it was all worth it.

Let’s take a look at some of the features of the site:

• WordPress Platform – built using the state-of-the-art WordPress platform (We’re WP junkies)
• Facebook Photo Gallery – this allows the Riverfest staff to manage all of their photos via Facebook and pull them into the website.
• Contact Form – we route your emails to the appropriate contact using this awesome software
• Facebook Integration – like button and link to our FB page
• RSS feed – stay in touch with your RSS reader
• Slideshow with featured events and links
• Easy menu management
• Banner Ad management for the sponsors
• Event Calendar with Fancy Box technology to display larger versions of images as well as navigation

Testimonial from Riverfest President, Mike Schieber:

Scott, I need to thank you for everything that you did for our Riverfest website.  You went above and beyond our expectations.  There are not a lot of people that would have done what you did.  When our previous web team informed us that they no longer were available to make the changes to our site, and our festival was 6 weeks away, I was totally at a loss for what we would do.  From our initial meeting to the to the completion of the new site, you had us up and running in 7 days.  I am going to recommend you to everyone!    Thank you so much for a wonderful experience!

Here are my top 3 favorite domain name finding tools

1. Bust A Name – This is my favorite tool. I have used this one for a couple years and have successfully found domain names using it.  You can add a number of keywords, and enable/disable a variety of parameters, to help you find domain name combinations that are available for purchase. I like this best because I feel it saves me a lot of time and does a nice job creating combinations
2. Domize – This tool searches availability as you type. Find out alomst in real-time what domains are available.
3. Domainr - If you need to get creative and are open to exploring TLDs (Top Level Domains) from other countries, check this little bugger out. It is a smart application that will help you find creative spellings and opportunities you probably haven’t thought of. It’s fun to play with, so give it a try.

Hope these help you on your quest. Let us know what you think.

WPMU DEV is an essential ingredient when building WPMU websites. Not only do they provide a suite of themes (many BuddyPress) and plugins, but their forums are excellent for receiving support when you get stuck. Andrew and James, the guys who run the site, are incredibly forward thinking and building new themes and plugins every month.

As a funny side note, I have somehow been chosen to be their featured testimonial on their home page. I was shocked to see my face on their site, but I am very honored as well.

I am soon to release the new hosted website solution for small business and organizations and organizations that is built upon the WPMU framework. I could not have built it without WPMU DEV. I will keep you posted with the progress, as I look forward to sharing this very valuable website solution with you.  Grab our RSS feed to stay in touch.

Here is my story.

I started in January 2010 redesigning this site. To try something new, I simply installed a new version of WordPress in a subdirectory, using the CPanel Fantastico installer. Everything was great and I launched the new design on February 15th, 2010.

Then, just to check things out in Google earlier this week, I did a search for “La Crosse Web Design“.  I wanted to see if my new design had made a difference to my rankings.  Now I have held the number 1 or 2 position for that key phrase since 2003 in Google. When I checked the results, my stomach fell and my jaw hit the floor. I WAS GONE! I mean completely gone!!! My listing was no where in sight – I checked the next page and the next page and nothing.

Can you say panic? Google is essential to drive traffic to my website, and it appeared I was kicked out of their index.  OMG! Now what????

I immediately jumped into my Google Webmaster Tools and realized my site had dropped off right around the launch of my new site.   I also noticed the my sitemap files had not been crawled recently.  I was getting nervous.  I was playing by the rules of Google of course (no funny stuff)  and there was no reason that I knew of that I would be banned or dropped from Google.

Next, I thought I would resubmit my sitemap to Google using the Webmaster Toolkit. I had to do something!

When I went back to my site, I had to reinstall the Google XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress, and that is when the lightbulb went off and hit me in the face like a punch! Though, I confess a welcome punch, because any mistake on my end is far easier to correct than Google deciding to drop my site listing.

There in Big Red Letters it read ” Your site has been set to block search engine traffic” – or something along those lines.  Now I have seen the question appear when manually installing WordPress asking if you want to all search engine access, but other than that it was something I never gave much thought to because the default installations via Fantastico always granted search engnine access. That is until WordPress version 2.8.4 (from what I have researched), and I was installing 2.9.2.

What I have since learned ist that now by default, any WordPress installation that is made with Fantastico that is installing WordPress 2.84 or older  is setting your Privacy option to block  search engine traffic. This is obviously not good if you have launched your site and want folks to find you!

So what’s the fix?

Super easy! Just go to Settings >> Privacy and tick the top radio button that says to you would like your blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines. And then click Save Changes , of course.  See the image below:

If your bottom option is checked, beware that Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. cannot access your site and they will heed your command and remove your site from their site’s index. It’s great if you want a private site, but if you want search engine traffic, this is the kiss of death. And I still  have lip marks on my cheeks — you know the kind your grandma leaves as she greets you at Christmas.

So, now the wait begins.  I was alerted to this on Tuesday of this week and made the correction immediately. How long will it take me to regain my position? Should be interesting to find out. I am hopeful I will get back my previous rankings back, but I will have to wait and see. What a painful lesson I have learned, but it has made this web designer a little bit smarter!

Now go check your privacy settings!

***UPDATE 3/11/2010 (same day I wrote the article) ***

Amazing! While I just checked my site’s ranking in Google just before firing off this post, I checked it after (yes – I am obsessed), and I am back to my number 2 position! WooHoo! I am back in action!

So that means it took me about 2 days to get my site back into Google’s index. A testimony to me of the POWER if WordPress to make or break you in the search engines.

We have made lots of new changes already in 2010 and have many more to come. The first thing you may have noticed, is that we have redesigned our website. But it’s more than simply cosmetic. Our goal was to create a guided user experience to help you make the best choice when selecting a web designer / developer for your next website. Here’s a brief summary of what’s new:

• You can easily walk your way through our site taking our guided Tour
• We now offer 3 ways for you to buy a website. With solutions for all budgets and time lines
• Compare all of our solutions using our online comparison chart
• Posted average pricing to help get a feel for the average costs of our solutions (prices are noted within the Comparison Chart)

We are very excited at the new solutions we are offering because our ultimate goal is to help you succeed.  If you are looking to work with a web design company with soul, and is focused on helping you succeed, we’d love to hear from you.

Live Site: StokesElectricLLC.com | La Crosse, WI – Electrical Contractor / La Crosse Electrician

Dave Stokes is a great guy and it was a pleasure to work with him.  Not only is Dave kind and friendly, but his staff is as well. The problem with the Stokes Electric website when we were contacted is that is was essentially outdated, and Dave wanted to create a website that reflected the quality and professionalism of his services.  Just the kind of job we love.

Dave hired Bernadot Studios to create a new online image for his business, while also tying into his existing marketing campaigns.  He wanted an animation on the home page of previous work, and the ability to receive email leads from interested visitors. Upon delivering the site to Dave, he mentioned that we had created exactly what he wanted.

Services We Provided:

• Custom website design
• SEO
• Web hosting
• Email
• WordPress integrated website solution
• Image gallery
• Contact form

Here is a cool WordPress website we designed for the great folks at Unique Edge Customizing. We added a sporty flash animation to the home page to help give a modern and progressive feel to the site.  There are some cool rollover effects too when you move the mouse over the car (engine revving) or the tire (spinout with smoke). This type of animated intro sets the site apart from the competition and also makes the site fun to use – which helps make it memorable.

Services We Provided:

• Custom website design
• SEO
• Web hosting
• Email
• WordPress integrated website solution – self managed content
• Image gallery
• Contact form

If you would like to start using an RSS reader you can sign-up for a free one at Google: http://www.google.com/reader

RSS feeds can also be used on your website to post headines and article from other websites. It is a great way to keep your site fresh and updated without having to write any content.

Almost all of the sites we build provide your users with RSS feeds to follow the changes on your site. We can even include services such as FeedBurner to keep people notified of changes to your site via email.

Benefits of providing visitors an RSS feed on your website:

• Allows other to monitor your site for changes (via a reader or email)
• Allows others to republish headlines or partial articles to help create more backlinks to your site (a form of free advertising)
• Uses ‘pinging’ technology which alerts various websites (Technorati, Webblogs, Bloglines, etc) when changes to your site have been made, and then in turn index the entry on their site thus creating a searchable article and backlink

There are so many great applications and tools out there today, and we are going to start writing about some of these to show you how you can benefit from them.

If you are using Gmail as your mail provider, you may not have been able to access your mail. Gmail services have been down for the better part of this afternoon.

However, it seems to be fixed now as I have just sent and received messages. If you’re a client and your services are still down, please let me know.

If you want to check the Gmail Service Status , follow this link:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&hl=en