What’s your website grade?

For those of you who would like to know how your website is performing, and what steps you can take to improve its performance and search engine ranking, go to websitegrader.com, a free website analysis tool, enter your website address, and click “Generate Report”.  The cool thing about this site, is you can also check out your competitions’ websites and see how they rank.

Google Places–location, location, location!

If you haven’t yet claimed your Google Places Map listing, you better do it quick.  Now, whenever you “Google” a type of business, say, “web design in Williamsburg VA”, the Local Business Results appear at the top, center, and can completely take up the page, which means those of you who might have once occupied the prime real estate of the first page of a Google search, now have been pushed to the second page–unless of course you have claimed and optimized your Google listing.  For more on this, click here.

Be ever “Alert” with your reputation

Want to know if someone’s trashing you online, or if you have a dissatisfied customer?  Sign up for Google Alerts.  It’s a free service in which you can set up email alerts for your business name, domain name, owner or CEO name as well as names of other high-profile employees and any trademarks or branded terms you have, like names of products or services you’ve created. When Google’s spiders encounter these terms as they crawl the web, Google emails you a notice, along with its URL.  If you find some bad reviews on you or your business, contact us and we’ll give you some pointers on how to combat them.

For more SEO tips and how-to’s, go to Google Webmaster Central, or come to one of our DIY SEO workshops!

2010 SCP highlights

Thanks for making 2010 a banner year for SCP!  In addition to the dozen+ workshops we gave on DIY SEO, Blogging for Beginners and Social Media, as well as the HUGE article on us in the Daily Press, we managed to squeeze out a few projects:

New websites

Food for Thought Restaurant, Fine Signs, Uncle Richie’s Roast Seasoning, CXAnalytics, Charlie’s Antiques, Beez Scooters, StayFold, Cason Custom Homes, Signature Stone

*New videos/animations

StayFold, Cason Custom Homes, Success in the Saddle exercise series, Sumitomo Corporation of America, Swank Motion Pictures Inc., VA Fashion Week, Virginia Enterprises Inc., Extinction Rising novel

*Note–we are presently upgrading all our videos into new, state-of-the-art players–we’ll have links to them for you in our next newsletter.

Upcoming Workshops

Admission – $45/person by check, cash or Paypal.  Seating limited.  Please email or call 757.250.3197 no later than the day before each workshop to reserve your seat.

Do-it-yourself SEO (search engine optimization)

January 13, 4 – 6 p.m.

January 27, 3 – 5 p.m.

Business blogging and social media for beginners

Laptop required for this workshop.

January 20, 3 – 5 p.m.

February 3, 3 – 5 p.m.

“Hi, I hope all is well. I am currently working on a story about why people multitask and what experts say about multitasking. Do you have any friends who say will have Facebook up, check e-mails, talk on the phone and watch TV all at once? Do you know anyone who you consider a heavy “multitasker,” if so, please let me know asap. E-mail laprayam@yahoo.com with the contact info (phone number, e-mail address, etc.)…. Thanks!”

How about it–any “uber” mutlitaskers out there?

Google LOVES blogs, because their content is always changing. A blog can really push your website higher in the rankings, but only if it’s part of your website, like ours is, as opposed to using a third party like WordPress.com to host it.

We prefer the WordPress blog publishing platform. It’s content management system (CMS) easy to use and offers tons of free customizable templates (themes), many of which come search engine optimized and equipped with RSS feeds and “Subscribe” features (conversion forms) that allow subscribers to receive automatic updates whenever you write new blog posts.

When you start a blog, don’t blog about your business. Write what would interest others, within the context of your industry. For instance, if you sell carpet, don’t blog about your carpets–blog about interior decorating and carpet care tips. If you do create a blog, make regular posts to keep the search engines coming back.  And don’t forget to use relevant keywords liberally!

Like blogs, if you create profiles on the popular social media sites for your business, you need to keep the content fresh to keep followers engaged. If you use a content “auto-poster” for your blog, such as ping.fm, whenever you write a blog post, a link to it will automatically post to your social media pages.

This is your chance to become an author, and promote your business or organization. If your article is informative, other websites may re-publish it, providing more inbound links to your website!

Add your blog to popular blog directories, following the same procedures we outlined in DIY Website Optimization, Step 5 – Inbound Links and Directories for adding your website to online directories.

Okay, fellow bloggers out there, what advice and tips have you??

July 1st and 15th, 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Williamsburg Outlet Mall

6401 Richmond Road, Space 59

Admission $45.00

Seating limited. For reservations, email info@smellycatproductions.com or call 757-250-3197 by the Wednesday before each workshop.

Workshop Agenda:

1. Introduction – “What is a blog and why should I blog?”
2. Create your new WordPress blog
3. Post your first blog articles (AKA “posts”)
4. Moderate comments
5. Where to get your ideas for writing blog posts
6. When you should blog and how often