The following screen shot shows what past results looked like:

Search engine watch outlined past changes to the plus one button.  Google has been regularly testing different options for location, issues with load time and hover effects.

It appears that Google has replace the plus one button with a “Share” link that appears when you hover over the SERP result.

The link only appears if the user is logged into their Google+ account.  Instead adding the listing to your list of plus ones, clicking the link opens a window to post the SERP listing to your Google+ Wall.

Why the change?

We are not completely sure when this change took place, but it is not more than a few weeks old.  We also aren’t completely sure of the reason for the change.  Perhaps Google trying to increase interaction on Google+ profiles, or maybe past bloggers who suggested the buttons slowed SERP load time were correct.

However, it is our opinion that having the plus one button directly in the SERPs made it way too easy for someone to click “+1″ for many pages quickly.  This could create a SPAMMY Google +1 profile for certain sites and pages.  Now users must visit each page they want to plus one independently and click on the button (assuming it is installed on that site).

It is also possible that Google is just phasing the button out because it has not been successful except within the marketing community to try and inflate search results.

What it Means for Your Website

If you don’t do this already, you need to make sure it is very easy for people to share your website content on all the major social sites with the share buttons for Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and any other sites you are active on.  You should already be doing this, but it is never too late to start.

WordPress offers many easy to use social share plugins to get these on your site quickly.  Most other CRMs offer the same.  You can also search Google for the embed code for each site and manually add them to your source code.

What are your thoughts?

Any insight on the sudden change? Do you think it is permanent or Google is just testing things out as usual?  Leave your thoughts in the comments.

I have found that Buddypress and WordPress can be a great solution to many social, media and other site development needs.  However, finding a good host that will work well with both and allow for the natural growth of your site can be very difficult.  So hear are a few rules I have come to accept when picking a host:

1. Do Not Buy a Share Hosting Account… You Will Regret It Later

I have tried a few shared hosting accounts with companies like GoDaddy, HostMonster and other popular low cost hosting services.  The shared hosting accounts are always the cheapest options advertised on these sites and like most things in life, you get what you pay for.  While these options are very affordable ($3 to $9 per month), you will find that you have very little access to your server setup and functionality.  Often times, it is hard if not impossible to get multi-user subdomains to work (wildcards not supported) and usually the “technical support” is of little help.  More importantly, if you site grows to any level of prominence, you will use up your server bandwidth quickly and rack up usage fees.

2. Ignore Hosting Review Websites

Hosting review websites almost always use affiliate links when recommending hosting companies.  This means that they rank the sites with the best referral commissions the highest.   Needless to say, they aren’t exactly unbiased in their selections.   In most cases, they have never even used the hosting services they are recommending.

3.  Pick an Easy to Upgrade Hosting Solutions

Your site may not have many visitors or users in the beginning, but you need to plan ahead for growth.  If your site is successful, it can start eating bandwidth and memory quickly.  Especially if you are streaming any sort of media from the server.   You want to pick a host that has entry level packages that allow for simple upgrades without having to move your entire site to a new host.  Many times there are conflicts in coding, server settings, etc… when you move from one host to another.   To avoid these possible setbacks and additional development costs, it is best to plan ahead.

4. Test the Customer Service Options before Buying

Check the companies website for live chat, 24/7 phone support and other ways to talk to customer support. Try them out before you buy and see how long you have to wait on average. Stay away from companies that only provide support through tickets and email.

While most hosting companies will say they do not provide software tech support for third party software, the good hosting companies will point you in the right direction. Still, you should have the programming expertise to manage your own websites. This is not the hosting company’s responsibility.

5. You Get What You Pay For

You do not want to cut corners and try to save money with cheap budget hosting.  While you probably do not need to spend hundreds per month for a dedicated server, you also don’t want to go with the cheapest solution. You are best off picking a reasonably priced VPS (Virtual Private Server). They typically range from $30 to $50 per month and offer easy upgrade options.

If you have multiple business addresses, this tool can be invaluable for keeping track of your local SEO efforts.  Check out this screen shot of the dashboard:

I have found that managing clients with many addresses can be very hard to keep track of.  This website will help centralize most of your efforts with the most important local indexes out there.   The control panel clearly shows you where your listing has been claimed and where it needs to be added.

For the interface to work properly, you need to  make sure you use the same format for your listings across all local websites.  You do not want slightly different titles or addresses between sites.  If this is the case with your listings, claim them and make them all uniform with the same title, address, URL, local phone number and other relevant info.

Here are a couple more screen shots of the admin control panel:

The listing snapshot shows you where your listing has been claimed and needs to be claimed.   The one below gives you a clear to-do list to get all you listings filled out correctly and receive a 100% complete in the GetListed control panel.

The admin also allows you to review your complete listings for each major local vendor, see all your listing reviews in on place and provides suggestions on other sites to submit your listings to like localeze.com and universalbusinesslistings.org.

The website is also a great place to learn more about local SEO and stay on top of the latest local SEO news.  I recommend it for the business owners who want an easy (free) way to improve their local search traffic and the experienced SEO who needs a centralized place to track their local SEO efforts.

Thanks to David Mihm (a great source for local SEO info) and the others at GetListed.org for their hard work on this tool.

Please share your thoughts or local SEO tips in the comments.

An increasingly important aspect of website management and search engine optimization is your site’s speed and indexability.  So I thought I would share with you a quick top 5 list of the most common plugins I use to make the WordPress sites load faster and get indexed better by the search engine bots.  This site is more related to site speed optimization, but there is a direct correlation and benefit to a Search Engine Optimization campaign.

1. All in One SEO Pack or Platinum SEO

Of the first two on the list don’t technically speed up wordpress.  Still, if people can’t find your site pages, then who cares if they load fast.  All in One SEO Pack and Platinum SEO are two similar plugins.   All in One SEO Pack is the most widely used and the one I use the most.  However, the newer version of Platinum SEO has a few features All in One does not.  Most notably the ability to set the index, follow tag in the page/post editor.

The main thing you need to know about this plugin is that you need to use it to write relevant, keyword-rich titles and descriptions for every page and post on your site.  Each page should have a unique Title and Description tag and it should tell the searcher (and Google) what that page is about.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

Again, if people can’t find the page, then what good is it.  Google XML Sitemaps is an essential plugin that creates an XML sitemap and automatically submits it to the major search engines when you add new pages or posts to your site.  This tells Google how often they should be crawling your site, which pages you feel are the most important and which sections of the blog should not be indexed (e.g. search pages, tag results, etc) in order to avoid duplicate content.

3. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache can greatly improve your site speed if configured correctly.  It stores a static copy of your site pages on the server so they do not have to be called from the database every time someone visits that page.  It can greatly reduce the load time of your pages and the  load on your sever if you get a high volume of traffic.

4.  WP Minify

WP Minify is a great plugin for compressing your CSS, Javascript and other site files to reduce the number of calls your site makes as it is loading.  This plugin can have conflicts with other plugins and themes, so it doesn’t always word with every site.  There are tons of other minify plugins out there, so you can try some others if you have trouble with this one.   I head good things about Autoptimize.

5. WP Smush.it

Finally a large drag on load time is large images.  Many people load large images to their site without optimizing them for the web.  WP Smush.it allows you to “smush” the images (Jersey Shore style) on your site so they do not take as long to load.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for speeding up your WordPress site.  There are other more technical things that can be done to speed up the site, but these are a good start.  We will be touching on other tips like CSS sprites, condensing your CSS and Script files, cleaning up your database, etc. in future posts.

For now if you have any tips or I missed anything, let me know in the comments.

More importantly the site has a stand alone blog and social media integration so I can interact better with clients, followers and curious web surfers.

Here are some good screenshots of the site.  Please let us know what you think in the comments!

I would like to welcome everyone to the the musings of BPIZZY, aka Bryan S Powell.

I am entering the third year of running my own business and figured I should start doing some of the marketing stuff I sell to other people.  Practice what I preach so to speak.  So from here on out, for better or worse, I will attempt to write highly informative and interesting blog posts.   There is not guarantee that I will succeed in either regard, but at the very least I will share some useful information that I come across.

A few things I will be addressing are: SEO, Pay-Per-Click, Social Media and other general internet marketing topics.  Mostly I will share mistakes, hacks, how-tos, wordpress tips, and any other cool things that may make your life easier and your business perform better.

So subscribe to the RSS, Via email or Twitter @bpizzy and keep your eye out for upcoming posts.