Websitetology

I’m not going to tell you how- I’ll let AJ do it for me.

Want to link your Twitter account to Facebook so that your status updates sync? Easy, here’s how:

via How to link Twitter to Facebook – A Twitter Tutorial | AJ Vaynerchuk.

Twitter to Facebook is essentially RSS for the masses. People who won’t subscribe to your WordPress site- will read your feed in Facebook- so you can link you blog- or tweet about each new post- and have your tweets update Facebook.

Seems convoluted, but I get a 20 person bump to my site by hitting my 500+ Facebook friends about updates to my site.

If there is one thing you should do ASAP- it’s do a Google search on your business and see if you come up- from Google maps.
You should also be indexed in Google local.

This isn’t optional in the internet age.

I found a great tutorial on claiming your Google maps listing- I’d suggest you head over to the site and follow the instructions. If you are a business with multiple locations and one website- it’s even more important.

How To Claim Your Google Maps Listing

Step one is to go to Google Maps and do a search for your business. Let’s imagine we own K-Mart in San Mateo, California. So, we do a search for k-mart san mateo ca. Unless your business is brand new, chances are it will have been indexed by Google already. So, all we have to do is click the More info link next to the business title, as shown:

via How To Claim Your Google Maps Listing – Search Engine Guide Blog.

Localizing your business online is a key to making this all work.

If you have questions or problems, we can help. If you don’t have a site, you should consider taking our Websitetology seminar- the fastest most effective way to go online and get Google to pay attention to your site.

How is your website? Is it bringing you business?

I was recently asked to evaluate a site for some engineers. Of course, engineers are the people who came up with most of this mess we call the Internet- and so his response to my evaluation was, well, confused.

“Thanks for the analysis of our WebPages.  I have had this conversation before and you have to understand your market.  We are not trying to sell our WebPage to the “general public”, which includes marketing people.  Our target market is other engineers and that small group of persons – plant engineers, production engineers, VP Engineering, QC Managers, environmental managers, etc. that will make decisions regarding our proposals.  Normally we will contact persons and then ask them to go to our WebPages.
My goal was to communicate as much as possible on the front page.  For those who don’t want to read, the rotating graphics tried to communicate our capabilities quickly.  Our goal is not to be the best (too expensive and takes too much time), just credible and a solid company to do business with.
This WebPage business is an evolving process.  I have just contacted our WebPage designers – (name withheld to protect the clueless) to start making changes.
1.  I need to write more white papers on various subjects;
2.  I think we will do away with the news section on the front page.
3.  We are going to add Country X to our portfolio.
Eventually I want to start adding Podcasts.

The idea of a website as a brochure is an exercise in futility. Google doesn’t care about your brochure, unless you update it often.

While his site may serve his needs, it isn’t helping bring in new business, making new connections or presenting his firm as leaders in the field- never mind- that it doesn’t have search, RSS or a CMS to manage the content.

If all this sounds as confusing as having to type http:// before you enter an address on a site- it’s because engineers invented this tangled web we work on every day. We make it easy- for non-techie types to get it- and make their website work for them.

Spend a day with us and learn everything you need to know about how the web works- but the secrets of how you get to the first page of Google without paying for ads.

We’ll teach you how to maintain a website using the newest coolest Web 2.0 tools- which means nothing to buy, no code to learn and the ability to connect with customers easier than ever before.

What we preach is organic search engine optimization as opposed to paying for “Search Engine Optimization” voodoo. It’s much more cost effective and it actually works.

Your website can become a powerful business tool and easy to use if you take this seminar. Your webstats will prove it in no time.

So sign up now- we know you’ll become one of our many successful Websitetologists.

Thu Jul 30, 2009 at The Next Wave, 100 Bonner Street Dayton OH 45410 from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm.

We will be meeting at Nehemiah University 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45410.

If you have doubts- read what a student said after the last session:

Sometimes you get exposed to new stuff and it gives you that sick feeling of I had to travel and pay $$$ to go learn to know how much I didn’t know. But all said, that seminar was without a doubt one of the best investments that I’ve made in awhile

Hope to see you July 30. Note, location will change when we reach a threshold number of students.

See new location above in red.

Sometimes it’s just better to say- here is where someone got it all together- and tell you to click over and read their post.
This is one of them- the presentations on this site will help make it clear to you, enjoy:

Web 1.0 – That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 – This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 – This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

via What is Web 3.0? Semantic Web & other Web 3.0 Concepts Explained in Plain English.

Every blog starts humble- well, at least most do. If you have a niche, and do a great job, well, next thing you know, you’ve got a million dollar business.

Here is what 247WallSt.com decided were the top 25 blogs- based on their financial value- take a look:

financial values on blogs.

via The Twenty Five Most Valuable Blogs – 24/7 Wall Street.

Gawker, Huffington Post and Drudge report are at the top of the heap- but don’t let that stop you. There are opportunities untapped- just find your niche and jump in.

“But, I don’t want to have a blog for a website”- we hear it all the time. The reality is, WordPress is a Content Publishing system using a database. It really doesn’t care what your site looks like, it’s just the tool to manage that content.

I don’t call it a Content Management System anymore- because, it’s really not managing the content, you are. It helps you publish to the web what you need to publish, in the easiest way possible. We use other CMS systems like Drupal and Joomla- however, they require a steeper learning curve than WordPress- making them less likely to help you be prolific. Google prefers prolific – trust me.

We found the Thesis theme about 6 months ago. It’s a paid theme- something we typically don’t strongly recommend, however, from a developers standpoint, Thesis gives us all the tools we need to make a site do almost anything. For us, that’s worth it.

The Krispy Kreme UK site done in Thesis

For you- it means you can have a site that looks great, and doesn’t look like a “WordPress” site. The developer of Thesis-  Chris Pearson, is an active member of the WordPress community. He understands the idea of supporting his theme, and has been building a community of users. He’s on Twitter- Personified

Which brings us to the site that doesn’t look like WordPress (and there are many of them) that I thought I’d highlight today- Krispy Kreme UK. Take a look at the screen shot- or wander over to the site.

And, if you don’t want to pay for Thesis, there are some other premium type themes that are free. Read this post to see what’s out there.

A big part of building a site these days is proving that you (or your company) is the expert at solving problems. So while a “blogroll” or links page is nice, why not give your viewers a customized search portal- that only indexes sites that you think are great (it’s one way to stop people from finding your competition- right?)

Here is how Google describes the custom search engine service:

Have a website or collection of sites you’d like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine tailored to your needs.

Create a search engine tailored to your needs

Include one website, multiple websites, or specific webpages

Host the search box and results on your own website

Customize the colors and branding to match your existing webpages

via Google Custom Search Engine – Site search and more.

There are a lot of good sites that cover WordPress- maybe we should have one just searching the sites we think are useful- just one more thing to add to the to do list!

From Boston to Jacksonville to Palm Springs, we’ve offered this seminar to companies who want to get the most out of their website and the potential of social media. And the best part, in Dayton, it’s only $139- whereas in Palm Springs it’ll cost you $1299

The tough economic times are forcing businesses to do more with less. We can help. Websites aren’t like a Yellow pages ad- just paying money and putting one up isn’t going to get you business automatically. Websites have to be updated, have useful information that is customer focused and they have to be built so that you can maintain it yourself. If you have a site like that, and come to our seminar you will be able to get listed on the first page of Google (without paying for ads). We can teach you how to be a webmaster in one day- without having to learn any code.

Spend a day with us and learn everything you need to know about how the web works- but the secrets of how you get to the first page of Google without paying for ads.

We’ll teach you how to maintain a website using the newest coolest Web 2.0 tools- which means nothing to buy, no code to learn and the ability to connect with customers easier than ever before.

What we preach is organic search engine optimization as opposed to paying for “Search Engine Optimization” voodoo. It’s much more cost effective and it actually works.

Your website can become a powerful business tool and easy to use if you take this seminar. Your webstats will prove it in no time.

So sign up now- we know you’ll become one of our many successful Websitetologists.

Wednesday, 25 Mar 2009 at Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45402 from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm.

While many businesses are spending their time worrying about getting on the top of Google, YouTube has been sneaking up to be the number 2 search engine knocking Yahoo to number 3.

From the New York Times:

And now YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. Google, incidentally, owns YouTube. In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore.

via Ping – At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool. – NYTimes.com.

Some enterprising businesses have started creating video sales pitches that are a great way to build confidence in their expertise and knowledge about their products. Recently when looking for comparison sites for large format color laser printers, they came up top in Google search for both their site and their videos:

So fire up the video cameras and start building a YouTube channel for your business and integrate your video into your site.

There are sites that we’ve built in WordPress that would be even easier to use if we had Boolean search capability. Real Estate sites in particular- where it would be great to be able to look at each post about each piece of property that falls into a certain price range, number of bedrooms, location etc. Or automotive sites- where you want Year, Make and Model search. While this is easy to do in Drupal or Joomla, they are a little more difficult for people to use. With the Pod’s plugin for WordPress 2.7 and above, it’s now easy to add categories of data to posts for searching and organizing.

Why Pods?

Wordpress is a great blogging platform. It lets you work with 2 main content types: blog posts and pages. However, Wordpress doesn’t allow users to define new types of content. This concept of “content types” is similar to that of Drupal (CCK), Expression Engine, Joomla, and other professional CMS (Content Management System) platforms. Pods allows users to create new content types (each content type consisting of a uniform set of fields). Wordpress, welcome to the next level.

via Pods » Why Pods?.

And to further substantiate why you should be active on other blog sites- this came to us through a comment on another site- via subscribe to comments. We had found information on similar plugin of this type called Flutter and another reader suggested Pods. That’s the power of Web 2.0 working for you.