77 Web Solutions

If you’re a small business owner you know that getting your website to show up on the first page of Google search results is critical. Especially, if you have a new website without much traffic.

We recently created a new website for Home and Stucco Inspections in Norcross, GA. They are a small business that specializes in home inspections in the Norcross, GA area. They have been in business for a number of years but have not had a website until now.

We optimized their website for keywords such as “home inspections norcross”.  We also had them add their business profile to Google Local and include their new website address. Within a matter of a week or two their listing was showing in the #2 spot for the keyword “home inspections norcross”.

How do you do this? Well, the answer is very simple and one that anyone can do. Just follow the steps below.

1) Go to the Google Local Business Center

2) Sign in using your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account you will need to create one.

3) Follow the instructions. It just has you fill out contact information about your business. Don’t forget to include your website address. It also allows you to create coupons.

When you’re done filling out all the information, Google will place an automated call to the phone number you have listed on the account to verify the account information. Once that’s done your listing should show up within a week or two.

If you need assistance with any of this please contact us for help.

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Twitter is the latest rage in social media and everyone seems to be “tweeting”. How can Twitter help get traffic to your blog? Easy, feed your blog into Twitter so all your followers will get your daily blog posts.

Twitter does not have an interface for feeding blogs directly into their site so we have to use a third-party tool like FriendFeed. FriendFeed is a service that allows you to consolidate feeds into one site that you can share with friends and family. In this case we are going to use FriendFeed to get our blog posts feeding into Twitter. Let’s get started…

1) Go to FriendFeed and create an account (it’s free).

2) Click on the Link Your Accounts link at the top.

3) Click the Blog link under the Blogging section.

4) Enter your blog feed URL into the Blog URL field.

5) Click the Import Blog button. That will start importing your blog into FriendFeed.

6) Click the Tools link at the top of the page.

7) Click the Post to Twitter link under the Friend Feed section.

Click the “Post my FriendFeed entries on Twitter” checkbox.

9) Enter your Twitter username and password and click the Login button.

10) Under the Feed Publishing section, check the “Post my FriendFeed entries on Twitter as…” checkbox and the “Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation” checkbox (this will link your posts to your blog and not FriendFeed.)

Now the posts from your blog will be feeding into Twitter. Everytime you post an entry into your blog it will show up in Twitter.

There are many other things that you can do with FriendFeed, including using their Facebook application to feed your blog posts into Facebook, but this seems to be the easiest way to get blog posts into Twitter. Enjoy.

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For everyone that has a blog, or is thinking about starting a blog, building traffic to your blog is an essential part of making your blog successful. One very easy way to help build traffic to your blog is to feed your posts into Facebook. This will allow all your friends and family to see your posts.

To feed your blog posts into Facebook just follow the steps below:

1) Sign in to your Facebook account.

2) Click “Settings” link (on the top nav bar) then “Application Settings”.

3) Click the “Notes” link.

4) On the right-hand side of the page under the “Notes Settings” section click the “Import a blog” link.

5) Enter your RSS feed URL into the “Web URL:” field.

6) Click the “Start Importing” button.

7) Confirm the feed preview (confirming that this is your blog).

Now all your blog posts will automatically be fed into your Facebook account for all your friends and family to see.

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The next WordPress and SEO tip that I would like to discuss is permalinks.

Permalinks are not a plugin but a setting within WordPress that will help the search engines better understand the content within your page.

Permalinks are permanent links to your blog posts. By default WordPress produces an “ugly” URL for your post. One that may look like this:

http://example.com/?p=N

The search engines can read this URL but it’s not very relative to the content of your post. They prefer a URL that looks more like this:

http://example.com/category/post-name/

Follow the steps below to activate the permalinks setting in your WordPress blog:

1. Sign in to your WordPress admin site.
2. Go to the Settings section and click on the Permalinks page.
3. Under the Common Settings section the “Day and name” option is selected.
4. Select Custom Structure and enter the following text and click the Save Changes button:
   /%category%/%postname%/

Now you will have “pretty” URLs for the search engines. Which will help the search engines index your posts properly and will help others identify the content of your post with just the URL.

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So now you’ve got a WordPress blog created and you’re ready to share it with the world. What’s next? There are a few must have plugins that are needed to make your blog search engine friendly. Without these plugins search engines such as Google and Yahoo! may not find your blog.

1) All in One SEO Pack Plugin – The first WordPress plugin that I recommend for search engine optimization of your WordPress blog is the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin. This WordPress plugin automatically adds and optimizes your page titles for the search engines for each and every page on your site. It also generates the needed meta tags in the code of each of these pages. What’s nice is that you can override the title and meta tags for these pages if you need to.

This is a “must-have” WordPress SEO plugin that will help with getting your blog pages indexing properly in the search engines. Just click on the link above and follow the installation instructions.

I will post more WordPress SEO tips tomorrow… stay tuned.

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I guess I’m just a purist, but I believe a company’s blog should look and act the same as their website. The navigation of these two sites should also be the same.

For example, our 77 Web Solutions website is built using the Joomla content management platform and our blog is built using the WordPress blogging platform.

Having both your website and your blog looking and acting the same will help site usability which will keep users on your website longer.

If you need help integrating your blog with your website please give us a call.

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Joomla is a very powerful content management system with the capability to create just about any kind of website. It also has some features that allow you to perform search engine optimization on your pages quite easily. Specifically, you can quite easily edit the meta description and meta keywords for each page (article) within your site.

However, they overlooked the most powerful change needed in SEO – the ability to change the “page title” or the title that appears at the top of the browser menu. This is the text that Google uses (in most cases) to display the link to your page. It also uses this text as one of the factors it weights on calculating importance for the person performing the search.

Here are a couple things that I found that allow Joomla to change page titles for you:

Home page - You would think that this one would be obvious but it’s not. To change the page title on your home page follow these instructions:

• Open your Joomla administration site.
• Go to “Menus” and select your default menu (should have an * next to it).
• Click the default menu item (the one with a star next to it).
• Open the “Parameter (Systems)” link on the left.
• Input your page title into the “Page Title” field.
• Save your changes.

Now you should see your updated page title showing on your site.

All other pages – This is where Joomla swings and misses. All the other pages in your site do not allow for you to change the page title without adding a plugin to do so. Follow these steps to change the page title on all the other pages within your site:

• Download the Tag Meta plugin
• Install the plugin – Go to “Extensions/Install/Uninstall”. You will need to unzip the downloaded file and install the 2 .zip files separately.
• Enter each page that you wish to change the page title – Go to “Components/Tag Meta/Items” and add each page individually.

This method works but is not the most time efficient method. It would be nice if someone allowed us to have a Page Title field in the same place as the meta description and meta keyword fields in the “Meta Data Information” section of each title.

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This is our first post on our new blog. In this blog we will be covering all things involved in website design, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, pay per click, content management and much more.

We certainly hope you enjoy the posts and we encourage you to provide your comments.

Thanks.

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