Using WordPress as a CMS is a great way to get a small regional business online. AudioVisionsEtc.com owner, Mark Shader, runs a business selling and installing custom Audio and Video systems for the home and office in southeast Florida. Mark’s old site was a frontpage site that wasn’t doing the job he needed it to do– despite this market being a limited one, he was barely a blip on the screen when it came to the Search Engines. The solution? WordPress. Why? With the RSS, Ping, and other tools available, sites quickly get search engine attention for all new content added. Also, with the clean codebase that Wordpress offers, Mark’s site is easy for the search engine spiders to parse, unlike the maze of bad code that FrontPage was producing.

With Mark’s site, using wordpress as a cms was key to making his site perform, yet provide him with a proper and professional web showcase for his business. A highly customized wordpress theme was developed, with many custom page templates that allow more functionality than an average wordpress site. Most of the content is similar in hierarchy and approach to a static site. But we’ve also made use of the bloggy bits of Wordpress, and as Mark adds content the site will grow with keyphrase rich content about the Audio and Video installations he’s doing in and around Miami. And every time he adds content, he’ll be creating backlinks into his site, as all the update services are notified and they post links to his new content. This will also get his new articles spidered very quickly, as the spiders find the links into his new content.

Customizing the Page calls in the template to allow better hierarchy navigation, and adding a breadcrumb nav, took this site the step up it needed to allow easy usability, a clear navigation path, and a slick interface without a lot of clutter.

Mark is also making use of YouTube for his video promos, and he’s added links to his youtube profile and pages. To allow him to do this I added plugins that make it easy for him to post his youtube videos directly to his site, either in his blogposts or in his pages.

The Search Unleashed plugin was used on this site to ensure that all content would be spidered, since the site relies heavily on Pages.

Because the work Mark’s company does is custom and quite stunning, a photo gallery was needed to show off his work. NextGen Gallery was chosen as the most versatile. As you can see if you check the gallery out, it does a wonderful job of showcasing the audio and video installations that Mark’s company has completed. I also added a random photo generator in the upper right corner of the site to spotlight different installations Mark has done. He can add more images of the same pixel dimensions to that folder at any time and they will automatically be added into the photo rotation.

Do you have a small business website that is underperforming in the Search Engines? I can help. Use the contact form to tell me what you need.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress as a CMS, custom wordpress theme design, Custom WordPress Website Design, Small Business Web Design, Search Engine Friendly Web Design

Promoting your business through video sites is a good thing. It’s the ultimate in Web 2.0, and if you’re good at it, use tags properly, and keep filesize/time limits firmly in mind, it can really help your website to take off. And we all know that YouTube videos can sometimes go viral, and really give your website a boost in traffic, providing you put a link to your website from your youtube profile and include your url on the end of your video, keep your SEO keyphrases in mind when creating tags, enable sharing, and do all the other things that will help in spreading your message using video.

The problem is that YouTube seems to be doing more purging of lower traffic videos these days. So you upload your video to YouTube, embed it in your blog, then find out a few weeks later that no one can see it. Should you not put things on YouTube? No, that’s not the answer, since if it DOES take off it can bring you a huge amount of traffic. But you should keep a watch on your videos and if a YouTube video of yours goes south, you should have an alternative video host to switch to.

Here is a list of alternatives to YouTube that all have embedding and can easily be added to your website in a way similar to youtube embeds.

• Revver.com
• Putfile.com
• Apnatube
• PhotoBucket

You can also self host your own video. There are Wordpress plugins and also add ons for other popular web aps such as Movable Type, Drupal, Modx, Joomla and others, that allow you to upload and embed videos on your own site, which does give you more control. The one gotcha with doing it this way is that sometimes the bandwidth involved can max out your hosting account. That’s one of the reasons the video hosting sites have become popular, the other being the potential for traffic from the video hosting site to your website. These are upsides that don’t exist when you self host, but you also retain more control over the video, the quality, the length, and other things.

Technorati Tags: Video Hosting, Youtube Alternatives, Using Video to promote your website

How COOL! I can check Google SERPs from different datacenters and see how I rank in each different world region for different keyphrases. This could be extremely useful for those who are doing international business and wish to localize different products to different areas or track the effectiveness of SEO campaigns by region.

I also noticed something else using this tool. Some of my long tail phrases that I’m just starting to work on optimizing for are very uneven, though the US SERP is consistently better than the others. With phrases that I’ve been ranking well on for a long time I see much less difference between areas, though there is some minor shift. So that means I can probably use this to track how my efforts are coming along for a long tail keyphrase in a more effective way now. I think levelling out the differences is as important for me as moving my site up in the serps, though sites of a regional nature tied to a brick and mortar business might not benefit from this the way I do.

There are also some other pretty cool tools, and all are granular down to the datacenter level. The PR checker shows you your google PR for a page from each datacenter, and also lets you check inurl, link, index site, and other search parameters per datacenter.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: SEO Tool, google localization tools, google datacenter tools