ionadas local Blog

Even those of us that are rather experienced in WordPress can get lazy. Sometimes we don’t keep our plugins up to date. And sometimes, PHP is upgraded on your server overnight, and you wake up to the dreaded blank-screen-of-death.

This has been my Monday.

Be deleting all the plugins for my site, I was able to get things running again. I’m currently reinstalling the plugins (and updating them). In the meantime, some of the functionality of this site will not be working.

So, remember this, boys and girls: Keep your WordPress plugins up to date!

Recently, Google added support for Service Areas to its Google Places management system. This allows you to register businesses that mostly go to clients’ locations, rather than having the clients come to the business. It also allows you to prevent the address in your Google Places listing from showing.

This is especially welcome for home-based businesses, who might not want to list their home address on the internet for all to see.

Businesses owners should realize that there is a significant disadvantage to this approach, however. A large part of Google ranking calculation is based upon the Citations a listing has received. Citations are pages that Google has found that list the company’s name, phone number and address (and are trusted by Google).

Yes, you can list your home-based business with Google and prevent the address from showing within Google, but you’re going to have a harder time building citations. You can try listing just your company name and phone number, but those citations tend to not be as strong.

So, do you use your home address or not? At the end, it comes down to a value judgment, but you need to be aware of the pros and cons of various approaches.

Google has added a “tagging” system to its Google Places system. These tags let a business highlight aspects of your listing, so that they stand out from the others. This advertising program is available in Austin, Atlanta, Houston, San Jose, and Washington for a flat fee of $25/month.

Being in Austin, Texas, an offer for this advertising program popped up in ionadas local’s Google Maps management system this morning.

“Learn More” takes you to Google Help pages. If you “Preview and select a tag, the following dialog box is shown:

You have the option of highlighting coupons, photos, videos or your website. If one of these is not available in your Google Places, it won’t be offered for tagging.

Here is what the ad looks like, in the 7-pack, the 3-pack, and the 1-box, respectively.

It’s too early to tell if this will result in an uptick in traffic, but watch here for updates. In the meantime, here’s the dashboard the advertisement adds to your management system, although it does not have any data yet.

Learn how to manage your company’s reputation with search engines, social media networks, blogs and other online media.

Details:
Tuesday, April 27th at 11am, Dave & Busters, Austin, Texas

This workshop will help you to:

• Monitor the internet for conversations impacting your business.
• Know when and how to engage in conversations online.
• Push problem search results down the page so that they receive less traffic.
• Avoid the potential pitfalls in online reputation management.

The workshop is free, but space is limited, so sign up today!

Note: We also have a coupon for PubCon 2010 Las Vegas.

ionadas local will be attending and speaking at PubCon South 2010 in Dallas the second week of April. CEO Brian Combs will be speaking on the “Personalize Search – Universal Search – Life Goes On” panel with Michael Gray and Dr. Amanda Watlington.

Brian’s panel is at 1:30pm on Wednesday, April 14th, and he will be discussing developments within Google Maps and other local search engines as they pertain to universal and personalized search.

If you’d like 20% off your ticket to PubCon South 2010, use the code “rc-7200720” when registering (coupon expires April 9th at 5pm central). We hope to see you there!