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.