http://www.expand2web.com/blog WordPress and Local Search Help for Small Business Websites Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:45:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Expand2WebBloghttp://feedburner.google.com Just the other day Google released a new gadget to add directions to your website. At first blush, this looked like a pretty cool way to add directions to your website, particularly for offline businesses. A better way to do this is to use Google Web Elements. Google Web Elements makes ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/6tAc-8fN1OU/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/add-map-website-google-web-elements/ I've been getting great feedback on the Expand2Web SmallBiz WordPress Theme. Many saavy do-it-yourself web consultants and small business owners have downloaded the theme and put their business online within an hour. But it does require a little background to get things going. You have to choose a hosting provider, install ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/zVhv4wRnJ9Y/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/small-business-website-in-the-cloud/ If you’d like to check out who’s reading your blog, and how they tracked you down, the incoming links and stats features of your dashboard make it easy. While there are many other plugins that can give you more analytics - these built in features are a great start. Checking ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/Y4Cp_jh0dLM/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/checking-stats-dashboard/ PayPal makes accepting payments quite easy. If you’d like to add a PayPal donation button to the posts, pages or sidebar of your self-hosted WordPress blog, this video will show you how. There are several PayPal requirements as you will need a PayPal premier or business account.  The basic PayPal ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/rNBj2P5pf2g/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/add-paypal-button-wordpress-blog/ Yelp is “focused on the reviewing experience” and started off by fostering a community of highly engaged users who write reviews about restaurants, dentists, and other types of local establishments. They tap into the “vocal minority” to provide content for the rest of us. Business owners can benefit from these reviews ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/_F62Pxiu4v0/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/yelp-for-business-owners/ If you have an offline business, the primary goal of your website is probably to attract new local customers to your door. But how do you track the effectiveness of your website? Sure you can track the number of visitors to your website with free tools like Google Analytics and the ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/u0SFtoMWGeE/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/google-voice-small-business/ WordPress 2.8 introduces an exciting new way to install and activate themes. Previously, to install a new theme on your WordPress blog or website you had to: Find your theme on the web and download the zip file Unpack the zip file to your local machine Get an FTP (file transfer protocol) client ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/BRDWleV2m0s/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/install-themes-wordpress/ Another excellent article by Matt McGee - 5 Ways Negative Reviews are Good for Business Matt lists 5 ways negative reviews can be good for your business: They create trust They provide honest feedback They can improve your SEO They can help you make better business decisions They offer a golden opportunity (to show excellent ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/p8tWbkuFMDQ/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/are-negative-online-reviews-the-kiss-of-death/ Themes are the key to the appearance of your WordPress blog. A key element of WordPress is that your content (pages, posts, comments etc) is stored separately from the theme or display data. What this means is that you can change your theme - and still use 100% of your ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/4HEvJ80lkAU/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/previewing-and-activating-themes/ If you're lucky enough to find yourself with a popular blog, you will likely find it necessary to occasionally moderate the comments that are left on your website. Here's a short video tutorial outlining exactly how to moderate your most recent comments from your WordPress dashboard. As shown in the video, ... http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Expand2WebBlog/~3/QW6uHxHJsbE/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/how-to-moderate-comments-from-the-dashboard/