As Google Places (formerly Google Local Business Center) evolves one of the most important aspects of their development is their mobile presence. The video below shows how Google Places has been enhanced to work more seamlessly with the iPhone, Google Android phones and other Smartphones like BlackBerry’s, Windows Mobile, Nokia and others.

With Android, Google wants to continue to play a leadership role in how mobile is intermeshed with local. And how much more local and intermeshed can something be than a device that’s never far from your fingertips than a mobile device?

This all bodes very well for small businesses who’ve invested the time to create and updating their Google Places page with photos, video, updates, mobile coupons and more.

Google Places now enhanced for smartphones Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

Using Yahoo! Site Explorer to find and use the backlinks your competitors are using to get on page 1 of Google search results

The problem: You’re on page 10 of Google search results for your city & keyword combination.

Solution: You need more links pointing to your website from other sites around the web. They’re called backlinks.

How to get there: Using Yahoo!’s free Site Explorer utility you can find out the most valuable backlinks your competitors are using and then get many of them for your own site. By applying some elbow grease you can still turn this old SEO tactic into a page 1 Google ranking.

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An easy way to build Google rankings Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

Episode 24 | Local Knowledge

There’s a new way to get on page one of Google search results by using a jQuery web design.

How do you design attractive websites for people while feeding Google the text it needs to improve your search engine rankings?

Recently I talked about how designing your website in Flash is a disaster from a search engine optimization standpoint even it if looks great from a web design perspective. People like the look of Flash web designs but Google can’t read the content of Flash movies (like video) so Google can’t rank your website for relevant keywords. The end result is poor search engine rankings.

The opposite end of the spectrum is a text-centric web design. Google eats ups the keywords like a pig takes to mud but the text heavy website design leaves people cold.

text-centric web designs rank well with Google but perform badly with people. What's the alternative?

For years website designers and SEO experts have tried myriad techniques to produce a pleasing uncluttered visual design with a text-centric SEO friendly design for Google. In the last couple of years a new web programming language has emerged called jQuery and it is quickly becoming popular for good reason. Many designs using jQuery mimic the interesting visual effects of Flash but with one key difference. All the text within jQuery effects are 100% accessible to search engines. This is great news.

jQuery is the holy grail of web design and search engine optimization

With jQuery effects you can combine text headlines with keyword rich text descriptions and break up the text with design elements, video and pictures. This chunking of website content allows you to feed manageable amounts of information to people so they get the point of what you’re saying without becoming overwhelmed.

Click on the image above to see an interactive demo of a jQuery slider panel

Let’s consider an example. A popular jQuery effect is called the slider. It features a panel that slides to reveal more content. While the person looking at the website is getting nicely chunked information, the search engine is able to read (or index) 100% of the text from ALL the panels contained within the jQuery slider panel. Take a look at the Delegate design made by WooThemes (one of many jQuery designs available in our Percolator Package) . Make sure to click on the picture of the Delegate WordPress theme to see the demo and then scroll through the slider panels to see the content rotate through the design.

jQuery has many effects that can be used to chunk text heavy content into visual design that’s more manageable. For example, we used jQuery expanding panels on a website magazine design that shows multiple blog posts on one page, an action that would normally leave a person scrolling down the website page for days.

Instead we featured the article headline and a visual call-to-action for the user to read the post by simply clicking a plus sign. As soon as you click the plus sign you see the entire blog post. When you’re done reading, you click on the minus key to put the post content away and move on to the next headline. What would have been page after page of dense text has been reduced to a few inches of precious screen real estate.

Click on the image above to see a demo of the jQuery expander (look for the plus signs)

Page one of Google Search Results

jQuery is a design and SEO powerhouse and one you can’t afford to ignore if you want to appear on page one of Google search results while still having a great looking design!

Julian Seery Gude, ed LOCAL Na8ion

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Get on page one of Google with jQuery Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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For those of you who have products or services that can be sold anywhere the Internet has opened up new revenue and growth opportunities for small business that never existed before. But just because you can get business from anywhere doesn’t mean that your marketing effort should be similarly broad.

While I encourage you to think globally when it comes to your ideas and marketing differentiation I would strongly suggest that you act locally when it comes time for targeting your message and advertising. The money you can make from competing aggressively in your local market can fuel your ambition to expand regionally or nationally.

In the mean time you’ll spend MUCH less time on your internet marketing, see results faster and things like social media outreach and search engine optimization are childs-play at a local level as compared to similar national/global efforts.

Here are a few examples

Local Marketing Effort

• Search engines: you only compete on your search terms with local geographic modifier (e.g. Florists Los Gatos not Florists EVERYWHERE)
• Advertising: you only have to rise above the local advertising din. It’s easier to make noise locally with any kind of online or offline advertising
• Social Media: you only have to target local users of social media with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, an effort that will lend itself to a much more manageable social Rolodex.

Think Global – Market Local | Episode 23 Local Knowledge Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

Need to prepare your photos or images for your website? You bet you do!

Episode 22 of Local Knowledge shows you how to edit the dimensions (pixel size) of your photo/image, crop your photo and also reduce the file size of your photo so your website loads faster.

You can use common photo editing software that comes with your camera or computer to do this but these programs often lack the ability to change file size, a critical component for web images. Not only that, PC and Mac software is often overly complex and expensive due to its myriad functionality.

One free solution to this problem is to use Picnik.com (not affiliated in any way with Local Knowledge). Picnik.com is easy to use and their free version gives you the ability to quickly change your photo/image dimensions, crop, and reduce file size.

QuickTime, iPhone or iPod Download.

- Julian

Julian Seery Gude
editor Local Knowledge
LOCALNa8ion.com

How to edit photos for your website using Picnik | Local Knowledge Episode 22 Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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Today’s Local Knowledge video tutorial is a two-parter (this is part 2 of 2) so be sure to catch the first half by watching here.

This lesson shows you how to add a new blog post to your WordPress small business website while also optimizing your post for search engine optimization.

You’ll love this information if you’re a small business owner who wants to generate more sales leads from search engines like Google. To accomplish this, you’ll want to pair frequent website updates with our search-engine savvy blog post formatting tips.

Julian Seery Gude
editor, LOCAL Na8ion
www.localna8ion.com

What every small business should know about WordPress, Episode 21 Part IIIb Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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Today’s Local Knowledge video tutorial is a two-parter (this is part 1 of 2) so be sure to catch the second half by watching here.

This lesson shows you how to add a new blog post to your WordPress small business website while also optimizing your post for search engine optimization.

You’ll love this information if you’re a small business owner who wants to generate more sales leads from search engines like Google. To accomplish this, you’ll want to pair frequent website updates with our search-engine savvy blog post formatting tips.

Julian Seery Gude
editor, LOCAL Na8ion
www.localna8ion.com

What every small business should know about WordPress, Episode 21 Part IIIa Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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Episode 20 continues our Local Knowledge video series on basic skills you’ll need in order to run your small business Website using WordPress. Our lesson today kicks off with some background on how your normal website (the frontend of your website) relates with the WordPress Dashboard (the backend of WordPress) and concludes by hightlighting the most often used parts of WordPress. Our examples even give you a sneak peak of editing and adding a blog post and page – something we will cover in greater depth in our next video lessons.

This lesson assumes you have a working WordPress installation and that you have logged in.

Part II – What every small business should know about WordPress | Episode 20 Local Knowledge Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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Episode 19 begins our Local Knowledge series on basic skills you’ll need in order to run your small business Website using WordPress.

Our lesson today kicks off with some background on using WordPress to power your small business website and concludes with a how-to video showing you how to log in to WordPress. This lesson assumes you have a working WordPress installation.

I’ll be continuing the WordPress for small business video tutorials by covering the most common things you’ll need to know to update your WordPress website on your own.

You can also follow the Pictorial under the video if you don’t want to watch the video intro and video lesson.

Step-by-Step Pictorial Below

Step 1: Click on picture to see full fize image

Step 2: Click picture to see full size image

Step 3: Click picture to see full size image

What every small business should know about WordPress | Episode 19 Local Knowledge Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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In today’s episode of Local Knowledge I talk with viewers about how access to technology for small to medium sized businesses is creating big change fast in local online marketing. I cover easy-to-update websites and low cost online video to how Smartphones like the iPhone 3GS should be in the pockets of businesses like yours right NOW. Access to high quality low cost tools to make websites and online video offer companies with small budgets the chance to participate in marketing that used to just be for those with deep pockets. This is truly the age of The David’s triumphing over the Goliath’s. Here’s the link I mention in my video about the local CBS Television affiliate in Miami who used an iPhone 3GS to shoot, edit and upload his story to his station that broadcast it over the air.

Access means Big Change Fast | Episode 18 Local Knowledge Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -