There are some plugins that turbo-charge any WordPress installation, taking it from blogging platform to powerful CMS. They enhance WordPress, making it faster and more powerful. Chances are that your competitors are using these plugins so maybe its time that you thought about using them too.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is an essential part of getting your site ranked on Google. The great thing about WordPress is that it’s already pretty good for SEO out-of-the-box (according to Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Web Spam) But you can improve it further by installing a plugin that fine tunes your SEO. All-in-One SEO is a great choice that has enough options to juice up the SEO of the average WordPress user.

Analytics

Every webmaster knows that to develop your site you need to know who’s visiting, when they’re visiting, where they’re visiting and how they’re finding your site. Google Analytics is the best free tool for tracking your sites analytics. Google provides a tracking code that you can insert in the tags of your theme. However, if you change your WordPress theme the tracking code will disappear. By using a plugin like Google Analytics for WordPress the tracking code is no longer held in the theme and you won’t be in danger of your stats disappearing.

Cache

When you cache your website information is stored as a static file and served up to each website visitor. This means that your website isn’t having to reload all of the information from your database each time someone lands. Caching is the best way to speed up your website, and is particularly useful for photographers, who often have image-heavy websites which cause slow load times. A good choice is WP Super Cache.

Backups

Backing up your site is an important part of being a webmaster. You never know when your server could expire, your database corrupted or your site hacked. It’s worth making regular backups of both your site and your WordPress database. A great option for this is ManageWP. ManageWP is a service which manages your WordPress sites. It has built in backup to Amazon S3 as well as Dropbox. Currently it is in beta so is still free, but after launching at the end of November it will remain free for users with 3 sites or less.

Mobile

The world has gone mobile. More people are now accessing the internet through mobile devices than ever before. In fact, we’ve reached a point where more people are surfing the web on mobiles than on computers. You need to make sure that you’re in on the game and a great way to do this is to install a mobile switcher like WP Touch Pro (or the free version). This detects what device your site’s visitor is using and serves them up a version of the site that is suitable.

Contact Form

Contact forms are useful for letting people get in touch with you. Gravity Forms does that but it takes forms to the nth degree. You can use Gravity Forms for any sort of form building and all of the data is stored on your website’s database. It makes it easy to collect data, and to look at it later.

Social Connection

Sharing is the cornerstone of Web 2.0 – these days it’s what drives the internet. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Reddit, the list goes on and on. People are connected in ways they never have been before. Sharing is the perfect way for you to spread your photography amongst people who haven’t seen it before. Installing a plugin like ShareThis makes it easy for people to share your photography without you having to do any work at all.

Notifications

Hello bar is a notifications bar that pops up at the top of your page. It lets you add simple notification messages at the top of your page. Unlike pop-ups these bars are helpful and unobtrusive, letting you grab visitors’ attention with a call to action, without annoying them in the process. Hello bar is a commercial plugin but it comes packed full of useful features like analytics and A/B Testing.

Ecommerce

Selling photographs through your website can be a great way to supplement your income. This is possible by extending WordPress with one of the many eCommerce plugins. By installing a plugin like WP E-commerce you can sell your photographs from your site. WP eCommerce is a free shopping cart plugin that you can use to sell photographs, including digital downloads so you can sell high-resolution versions of your images – no printing required!

Spam

Spam is the scourge of every WordPress website. As a webmaster you can get endless comments asking you to buy some prescription pills or visit a casino site. Akismet fights spam. It uses an API key which you can get from WordPress.com. It is free for non-commercial use and there is a fee for commercial users. It’s a life-saer though when it comes to the battle against spammers.

The results reveal that:

• 46% of B2B participants said their most important objective is to generate leads.
• 53% of all participants say SEO makes the biggest impact on lead generation, followed by 28% for PPC and 19% for social media.
• 75% of B2C companies are the most active on Facebook, followed by 8% on Twitter and 6% on LinkedIn.
• B2B companies are active more evenly across all three leading networks: 34% Facebook, 26% Twitter, and 25% LinkedIn.

The 2011 Webmarketing123 State of Digital Marketing survey was conducted online in September. Over 500 marketing professionals completed the survey.  You can download the entire report here.

Overall, 60 percent of respondents said they plan to increase their budget for social media marketing in 2012; 53 percent plan to increase their budget for SEO and 40 percent will increase their PPC budget.

Source: Search Engine Land

Here’s a list of 16 SEO plugins for WordPress.

1. All in one SEO pack

(Visit Site) Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines and gives you many options for customizing things such as Meta data like page titles.

2. WordPress SEO

(Visit Site) WordPress SEO is an all in one solution to search engine optimize your WordPress blog, featuring titles, meta descriptions, optimized breadcrumbs, XML.

3. ScribeSEO

(Visit Site) ScribeSEO takes all the guesswork out of SEO for your wordpress site.  It basically does the majority of the SEO work for you and helps you:

4. SEO smart links

(Visit Site) SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

5. Google XML sitemaps

(Visit Site) This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.

6. Platinum SEO pack

(Visit Site) Platinum SEO Plugin offers Complete onsite SEO solution for your WordPress blog.

7. SEO friendly images

(Visit Site) SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes.

8. Redirection

(Visit Site) Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have.

9. SEO No Duplicate

(Visit Site) This plugin helps you manage your search engine duplicate content, by setting your post page’s canonical to the permalink.

10. Headspace 2

(Visit Site) HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks.

11. I Love Social Bookmarking

(Visit Site) I Love Social Bookmarking is a simple WordPress plugin that allows your readers to submit your content to social media services via a clutter-free drop-down list. SEO optimised by using the “nofollow” tag.

12. Robots meta

(Visit Site) This plugin makes it easy to add the appropriate meta robots tags to your pages, disable unused archives, nofollow unnecessary links and more.

13. WP super cache

(Visit Site) This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog.  After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.  This plugin makes your site faster and faster loading sites rank better in SERPS.

14. WP-Paginate

(Visit Site) A simple paging navigation plugin for users and search engines. Instead of next and previous page it shows numbers and arrows.  In addition to increasing the user experience for your visitors, it has also been widely reported that pagination increases the SEO of your site by providing more links to your content.

15. Nofollow Blogroll SEO

(Visit Site) A simple plugin that adds rel=”nofollow” attribute to non-homepage Blogroll Links. Improves SEO while still providing some link love to your favorite sites.

16. WP SEO Tags

(Visit Site) This Plugin logs incoming queries from searchengines like Bing, Google and Yahoo. The last requests can be displayed via a sidebar widget.

Matt Cutts from the Web Spam team at Google showcases the good and the bad of WordPress as seen through the eyes of Google, including basics on how Google search works and how you can boost your blog’s results in Google searches.

It explains keyword research a bit and what is needed to dominate Google for competitive keywords.  So here it is…

Google’s Keyword Tool – Understanding The Numbers

Here are examples of the two keywords you suggested you wanted to rank for “muscle pain” and “back pain”. As you can see below there are different numbers of searches performed for each which pertain to the way in which people search. The match types are “broad”, “exact” and “phrase”.

Broad Match means those keywords appear anywhere in the search parameter ex. “lower back pain” counts in that given search volume just as “back pain relief” or even “relieve my back pain”. It basicaly means those keywords “back” or “pain” appear anywhere and in any order when someone does a search. This is why it has the largest search volume.

Exact Match means that the person searching searched for exactly that phrase with no other keywords. This is why the search volume is lower than both Broad and Phrase matches.

Phrase Match means that the keyword was included in a search in that exact order. People searching might still include other keywords in their search but the order inwhich the keywords appear is always in the same order. So these keyword phrases would count towards that monthly search volume: “back pain relief”, “back pain medication”, but not “pain in lower back”.

The reason I am pointing this out is because you noted you want to rank for “muscle pain” and “back pain” which from a Broad Match perspective has a very high monthly search volume. That might lead you to believe you’ll receive 2+ million unique visitors a month if you rank #1 for the term “back pain” but this is not the case.

These Broad Match search volume numbers come from hundreds in not thousands of different keyword phrases. You’d have to rank #1 for every single one to receive that many visitors a month.

A large portion of searches performed each month come from what are called “long tail keywords”. That basically means keyword phrases that have atleast 4 words in them. An example would be “How to cure back pain”.

To rank on the first page of Google or any other search engine you need to focus on several very competitive keywords but also have a large number of pages focused on smaller related “long tail” keywords.

So if you do a search on Google for “back pain” you’ll notice that the sites that are on the first page are very large sites containing hundreds of pages. Sites like webmd.com and wikipedia.org are very hard, if not impossible to beat when it comes to SEO. They are considered authoritative sites and will most likely never fall off the first page under such competitive keywords.

But you’ll notice a website ranked #9 on that page cure-back-pain.org that is operated by an individual who spent a lot of time writing articles about back pain and doing SEO so he ranks on the first page. He actually started the site in 2006 so it has been online for 2 years now. The age of a website also plays a role in SEO but I’ll explain more about that later.

The reason I am pointing out his website is because he has hundreds of pages of content on his website and that is one of the main reasons why he is ranking so well.

To rank as well as his website you’re going to need hundreds of pages of content all related to back pain. You’re going to have to create a portal of information related to the symptoms people have and then explain how your products can help relieve these symptoms.

I am focusing on the keyword “back pain” because that is one of the keywords you mentioned but I noticed you have other products that you’ll be selling from your site as well. Your product line contains items such as herbal tea, safron capsules, Tibetan rhodiola capsules etc. that are all considered natural medicines.

My thoughts are that you could focus on the natural aspect of your products. Or the fact that your products are Tibetan medicines.

One option you have is developing a portal about Tibetan medicine and the benefits of natural remedies for instance. This is possibly what you were trying to accomplish with your site *url deleted*.

SEO is a long term strategy and one that has a greater return on investment than say PPC advertising because once you do the work and build up a resourceful site you can reap the rewards of organic search traffic for years to come. And since 70% of people click on sites listed in the organic search results over the ads that appear alongside them you’ll fair far better in terms of converting traffic to buyers.

How to Rank on The First Page of Google For Your Keywords

I’m going to now advise you of what is required for your company to dominate the U.S. market using internet marketing tactics such as SEO, affiliate marketing and social networking.

The main goal is to achieve maximum visibility wherever people are active online whether it be from an internet search or an online community. You want to be the first thing people see when they go online to look for help with their ailments.

To accomplish this you must apply a comprehensive online marketing strategy that will ensure your brand is at the forefront of major search terms, related websites, communities and social networks.

1. An ecommerce website with these features:

• SEO friendly meaning URLs are static and meta titles and descriptions can be controlled for every product page.
• Affiliate tracking so an affiliate program can be operated and run successfuly.
• Built in CMS so content can be added easily.
• W3C-standards compatible meaning everyone can see your store in the same way, regardless of which web browser they use.
• Ability to accept all major forms of payment including Paypal, Google Checkout etc.
• Ability to detect the geographical location of a customer and shows prices in their local currency.
• Integration with UPS, UPS online tools, USPS, FedEx, Canada Post, Australia Post and Royal Mail for live shipping quotes.
• Single page checkout system as well as guest checkout which make it easy to order.
• Complete backend for customers so they can view orders, track their shipments and order easily in the future.

Along with your products you should have at least 100 other content pages explaining the benefits of each product. In depth articles about how your products help customers as well as news and company info should be provided.

This ecommerce website should be hosted on a dedicated server which would have dedicated resources for it including a dedicated IP address. This adds a level of security that you cannot receive when dealing with shared hosting. Of course the site would be protected by 128 bit industry-standard SSL security.

2. An information portal with these features:

• SEO optimized including static URLs. This includes optimized Meta titles, descriptions, content and site structure.
• Ability to easily add content by multiple authors online via browser.
• Between 300-500 articles related to your products. These articles would be optimized for search engines but also humans so they are of high quality.
• A complete user forum (bulletin board) where people can join in discussions. This forum would be optimized for search engines so the pages and content get indexed on search engines.

3. Social Networking

Because a majority of people online are spending their time on social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook it is essential to add this to your online marketing strategy. It is fundamental to be proactive on such sites and be engaged in conversations related to your products.

• Myspace page optimized with your search terms and product info.
• Facebook business page

4. Press Release Distribution

Press releases are an excellent method for not only announcing news to the public but also for SEO.

5. Article Distribution

Articles written around keywords you are targeting should be written, optimized and submitted to the major article repositories online. Many of these articles are redistributed on news and personal websites that further help build your link popularity.

6. Social Media Optimization

Just like article repository websites there are websites that focus on user generated content such as hubpages.com and squidoo.com where you can create and distribute your own content. These sites are an essential part of creating buzz and interest around your product as well as driving traffic to your main website.

7. Satellite Websites

Because of the vast majority of keywords you’ll be optimizing for it is suggested you create a number of satellite websites. Satellite websites are smaller informational websites optimized around alternative keywords. These sites would be focused on one main keyword such as “arthritis pain relief” and would contain unique information related solely to arthritis and relieving pain.

These Satellite websites would collect and drive traffic to your main ecommerce website to increase sales and also help boost the ranking of your main site.

8. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another essential component of online marketing that I suggest you implement. Affiliate marketing gives incentives to website owners and online marketers to promote your products online.

Affiliates drive traffic to your ecommerce store via their own websites, PPC ads with banners and text links you provide them so that they receive a commission when someone purchases your products. You pay out commissions only after an order is made.

A complete affiliate program can be implemented along with program management and ad creation.

9. Aquiring Websites

One method to fasttrack brand visibility online is to purhase existing websites that already rank for keywords that we want to rank for.

After doing some initial research I’ve found atleast one person who is willing to sell their website. I can aquire more info and negotiate a deal with them or others to see if it is worthwhile to pursue.

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So that is where I am stopping.  It gives you an overview of what I propose needed to be done to not only enter but dominate major keywords on Google.  This is a pretty big project and by no means do you need to do all of these things if you are a small business.  Of course the more marketing you do that is focused the better.

I hope someone finds this info useful.  I figured I’d post it instead of letting it sit in a folder on my hard drive.

(The things I list in this post aren’t solely for photographers btw, they’re for anyone who has a business.)

This is the time when strong businesses thrive and the weak fail. This is the time when it’s essential to hone your marketing skills to bring in new business.

If you’re a photographer and you want to boost your business in these trying times then there are things you can do when you’re not shooting to increase your revenues. I’m going to focus on the web because it’s the cheapest method of marketing and the easiest way to bring in new clients.

To a lot of people search engines are their main means of bringing in new sales (it is for me). That is because they rank on Google, Yahoo or even MSN for keywords people are using to find what they offer. If you’re the first business people find when they go online to look for information or services this means increased sales. That is why SEO has gotten so popular over the years.

If you build your site in accordance to SEO guidelines then you’ll be on your way to the top of the search engines. There are many rules to SEO but if you follow just a few you’ll be doing better than 90% of other photographers in your market. So the first of the 3 ways is making sure your site is as SEO optimized as possible.

Pay Attention to SEO

1. Make sure your site is SEO friendly. If you’re using a service where your site is easy to update and contains flash then most likely your site is not SEO friendly. If you’re paying a monthly fee to host and maintain your photography site then there is a good chance your site is really being hurt by this. When you skimp on your site you pay in the long run.
2. Make sure you blog every day. If you don’t currently blog then you’re missing out period. The more you blog the more Google and other search engines will spider your site and this will increase your traffic and rankings. And when you blog from a blog that is SEO optimized you can really see the difference.
3. Make sure you do at least some basic keyword research to figure out what people are actually searching for. There are free tools online that you can use to find this info out. Search Google for the word Keywords and you’ll find the most popular one. Type in your location and photographer and see how many numbers come up.
4. Make sure you use H tags in your web pages. H tags are basic heading tags in HTML that specify a title and specify to search engines what a page is about. So if the topic of your page is Photography Services be sure to include that title in between H tags, specifically H1 tags. There are many basic HTML guides out there you can learn how to do this from.
5. Make sure you use very specific title tags for your pages. Title tags specify what shows up in the browsers title. You know the very top of the browser. Search engines take the title tag very seriously and you should too. The more focused the better.
6. Make sure you network with other photographers. If you have friends who are photographers then exchange links with them. The more links you have to your site from related sites then the better your site will rank. Be sure your link partners use the main keyword you’re optimizing for in the link text they use to link to you.
7. Make sure you do not use a splash page on your site. A splash page is usually a flash animation that is an intro to the main part of your site. It usually contains flash and sometimes music. Splash pages are outdated and should never be used on a site. And I mean never if you ever want to rank well on any search engine.
8. Make sure your site isn’t solely in flash. If it is you’re sacrificing rankings. You need real textual content on your site search engines can read. If you can’t get away from flash make sure you include pages on your site that are linked to from the footer or non flash section that include keywords you want to rank for.
9. Make sure you’re getting new incoming links each month. Incoming links are links from other related websites. You can get new links to your site by writing and distributing articles like this one, distributing press releases, writing killer blog posts that people willingly want to link to or exchanging links. There are many ways to get links and that is just a few ideas.

Being Found via Local Search

Are you on Google Local?

The second method has to do with local search. You can rank on Google very quickly by listing your site as a business in your local area. All you have to do is search Google for “Google Local Business” and the first listing that shows up is Google’s where you can add your business.

What this does is allow you to list your business details including your URL to Google Local and also Google Maps. People searching for your service or business can then find you more easily in their location. Local business listings show up before organic listings in most cases. This depends on what keywords people are using to search of course, but being listed in Google Local is an easy way to get a front page listing in a matter of days.

Another way to get attention is giving away coupons. Google printable coupons are a free and easy way to bring in more business. You decide what your coupons should say, then customers print them out and bring them to your store.

Social Networking is a Must

The third method is social networking. Networking is crucial to any business and has become a lot easier due to the many social networks online now. If you’re a true marketer you can’t ignore the fact that Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin and even Youtube have millions of users who are all interested in certain things, have certain connections and all have needs.

If you’re not taking advantage of social networking right now then you are missing out on a huge audience. Youtube alone has already surpassed Yahoo as the second largest searched site on the web. That means more people search Youtube then they do Yahoo.

People might be on Youtube for different reasons but you can take advantage of this by educating, entertaining or even showing off your work. You already have digital media in the form of photographs. Put those photos into a slideshow video and upload it to Youtube, Googe Video, Yahoo Video, Vimeo, Revver, Viddler, Metacafe or even AOL.   To simplify things you can upload to multiple sites in one fell swoop using a service called Tubemogul.

Don’t forget to brand your videos with a URL back to your site. You can use free video editing software from Microsoft called Movie Maker, Videospin from Pinnacle or even Jumpcut. Brand your videos with your logo, URL and even by giving a quick presentation at the end which includes yourself talking. People love to see other people talking. They should be seeing you next! If you haven’t capitalized on social networking yet then shame on you. The world is out there waiting for you.

If you want to take all your marketing efforts to a new level then give something of value away for free. Give away a PDF ebook on how to take the best photographs, how to save money on their next photo shoot or how to make their photos last a lifetime. If you can put together an informing ebook on a topic people will enjoy and value you’ve just gone a step further than the majority of photographers out there. And this will set you apart big time.

The economy is bad. Everyone knows it. But it’s not the end. If you have some free time right now be sure you are making every effort to market yourself. Marketing online is the cheapest and easiest method available. And don’t forget the offline world where the majority of people reside. That’s very important too.  I’ll talk more about marketing offline in a future post.  Good luck!

You can read more in dept at my post titled “Best WordPress SEO Theme“.

If you want you can purchase this theme here.

I’m talking about the Thesis theme developed by Chris Pearson of Pearsonified.

Not only is Thesis well developed it is very robust giving bloggers many options for customization.  And yeah, it’s the best wordpress theme I’ve seen where someone took the time to work in things that are important to SEO.  And I’m talking mostly about page structure here… mainly the use of H tags.

H Tags and SEO

If you’re like me you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on wordpress themes over the years only to have to go into the code to fix the H tag structure used.  Which is a pain when you have to upgrade wordpress and the theme frequently.  I can’t count how many wordpress themes I’ve come across where the H tag structure is totally screwed up.  Meaning, H1, H2, H3 and even H4 tags are used for things like the titles in the sidebar.

H tags are really important to SEO, so each page of your site should only have one H1 tag, and subsequent H tags directly in your post content.  You shouldn’t have H2 and H3 tags wrapped around things that aren’t related to your post… ie.  Blogroll, Recent Posts, Pages, Calendar, etc.

If you want to see what I’m talking about you need to be using the Web Developer toolbar to disable the CSS of your site… or try it on this one to see what I’m talking about.  The post title should be an H1 tag and any subheadings in H2… and H3.

Thesis takes care of this for you and does a perfect job at it.  Right out of the box Thesis includes only a single H1 tag on each page, including the homepage.  Post titles on your homepage are in H2 which is correct.  On sub pages the Post title is H1… not the title of your blog (if you’re using text instead of a graphic) and any subheadings you use in your post are the only ones that appear on the page.  Perfect!

Title Tags in Thesis

Again Thesis gives you some options on the way to display Title tags in your pages.  Which is very helpful.  In your wordpress dashboard navigate to Design > Thesis Options to set the following options.

Home page settings:
Show site name in title
Show site tagline in title
Show tagline before title

All other pages:
Append site name to page titles

Because I’m super picky about my title tags here (for obvious SEO reasons) I’ve decided to add my own custom bit of code to display page titles.  If you look at the titles of my pages you’ll notice they’re only the post title or page title, nothing else.  That’s because I want my titles to be super targeted.  Including “Jeff Hendrickson Design” to the ends of my page titles only waters down the keyphrases I’m targeting.  So I leave it out.

Here’s the code I use to achieve this: (NOTE: You no longer have to use custom code to achieve this… it’s built into the admin of Thesis now.. Sweet!)

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); } elseif ( is_category() ) {
single_cat_title(); echo ” – “; bloginfo(‘name’);
} elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) {
single_post_title();
} elseif (is_search() ) {
bloginfo(‘name’); echo ” search results: “; echo wp_specialchars($s);
} else { wp_title(”,true); }
?></title>

Add Custom Meta Description Tags

Thesis allows you to easily add and edit Meta Description tags within each post or page by simply adding your description to a custom field.  All you have to do is add a custom field called “meta” to your post or page and insert your desired text.  This means you don’t need any extra SEO plugins to achieve custom Meta descriptions for your blog.

Also to make your category page titles more SEO friendly and unique you can change the titles of your category pages by simply adding a custom field “meta” to your categories.  This gives your category pages a more SEO friendly title then they would have otherwise.

Page Content Structure

The page’s content structure is very nice indeed in Thesis.  Your post title (H1 tag) and post content are high up on the page meaning your content is closer to the top of the page in the source code.  This means your page’s main content is the first thing Google or any search engine sees.  They don’t have to wade through countless links and basically all the stuff in your sidebars because your sidebar content appears after your main content in the source code.  You should see this if you view my site using the Web Developer toolbar and disable CSS.

Conclusion

If you’re a blogger using wordpress and you care about traffic and search engine rankings I suggest you pick up Thesis and try it out for yourself.  I only touched on the SEO aspects of Thesis but there are a ton of other great features that make it the theme I will be using here and on clients sites for some time to come.  It comes with lifetime updates as well and I’ve already seen some really sweet new features being added in the last update.  I am looking forward to what comes next.  My hats off to Chris and the team that developed and are continuing development of Thesis.  I appreciate it.

If you’re in the market for the best ever SEO wordpress theme then go get a copy of Thesis.  It’s currently $87 for a single license.   A drop in the bucket if you’re monetizing your site through search engine optimization efforts.

Thesis Updates

Thesis 1.6 has just been released.  It comes packed with a lot of new features that I think are pretty cool and much needed.  Check out this video on some of the new features. This video is on setting up drop down navigation…

As you can see Chris added new features that allow you to edit and customize your navigation menu easily from within the wordpress admin.  Pretty powerful.

In the below video Chris goes more in depth on setting up a site and doing customizations.

I’ve been using Thesis for well over a year on this site and can say without a doubt that it’s the best SEO theme ever produced and probably the best supported and most updated theme out there.  Even when I’m tempted to change the theme just for something different I don’t because I don’t want to have to go through all the customization and upgrade headaches other themes make you go through.  With Thesis it’s a lot more simple.

Grab a copy of Thesis and see for yourself.

Here’s an example below of Google Local in action.  A simple search for Durham Pet Sitter returns a bunch of local businesses that offer this service.   I’m not sure how the businesses are ranked here… if its first come first serve or if there is some other algorithm that Google is using, but I’d say get on board before it’s too late and you’re listed under the “more results near…” link

What Google Local is offering for Free to business owners.

Reach new customers on Google Maps and Google.com
Local customers are already searching for the products and services you offer. Why not make it easy for them to find you on Google search and on Google Maps? The Local Business Center is the place to start.

Works great for businesses of any size
Whether you run a single dentist’s office or dozens of coffee shops, manage all your listings from a single account.

Update your listing at any time
Use the Local Business Center to edit your listing whenever and however you like. Your Google Maps results will be updated in a few weeks, not next year.

Catch their eye with printable coupons
Google printable coupons are a free and easy way to bring in more business. You decide what your coupons should say, then customers print them out and bring them to your store.

Google Local gives businesses the ability to receive top rankings in Google without the cost of using Adwords or implementing an SEO campaign.

Sign up for Google Local Free.

You can edit these by using Google’s Webmaster Tools under > Links > Sitelinks

There you can either block or update the current sitelinks Google has listed for your site.  There might be links listed there that you have never seen under your listing in search results.  That’s most likely because your website isn’t popular enough to need it.  And Sitelinks really only show up if someone is searching directly for your brand or domain name (that I’ve seen).  If you don’t own a popular website then this doesn’t really apply to you.  In anycase you can get a sense of what Google sees as your most important pages.

There’s more clarification about Sitelinks here, but I’ve posted the gist of it below written by a Google employee named Maile.

Sitelinks are created algorithmically to help users quickly navigate
to the information they need on your site. To display sitelinks,
Google must basically determine: 1) a relevant structure for your site
conducive to sitelinks, and 2) that sitelinks will be helpful for the
user’s query.

For your verified site in Webmaster Tools, you can view your available
sitelinks. If you choose to block a sitelink, it will then appear in
Webmaster Tools as blocked. Once the change becomes effective, the
blocked sitelink will not appear in search results. You will not
immediately see a new sitelink listed in Webmaster Tools to replace
your blocked sitelink.

For example, let’s say you have 8 sitelinks in Webmaster Tools. If you
choose to block a sitelink, it will be removed from your “Current
sitelinks” section and added to the “Blocked sitelinks” section. The
blocked sitelink will not appear in search results for 90 days, and it
can be unblocked at any time. (It does, however, take a bit of time
for the blocked/unblocked change to take effect.) Every time you visit
the Sitelinks page in Webmaster Tools, whether or not you modify your
Sitelinks settings, the blocked sitelinks will renew their blocked
time for an additional 90 days.

In search results, the sitelinks displayed are determined
algorithmically based on the user’s query. So, while Webmaster Tools
may show 8 sitelinks for your verified site, it’s possible that search
results show only a subset (e.g. search results display 4 sitelinks).
Furthermore, the sitelinks displayed in search results can vary
according to the query (e.g. different combinations of sitelinks for
different queries).

Common questions
Can I trigger new sitelinks to appear in Webmaster Tools?
New sitelinks appear in Webmaster Tools when a general sitelink update
occurs. Updates (i.e. new sitelinks in search results and/or Webmaster
Tools) are not affected by your blocking or unblocking sitelinks. New
sitelinks cannot be triggered manually.

How can I get sitelinks to appear for my site in search results?
Your site must have at least 3 unblocked sitelinks in order for your
sitelinks to appear in search results.  Therefore:

1. If you block sitelinks in Webmaster Tools and leave fewer than 3
remaining, no sitelinks will appear for your site in search results.

2. If you have fewer than 3 sitelinks algorithmically generated for
your site, you will not see a sitelink options in Webmaster Tools.

Sitelinks are calculated algorithmically. Having a crawlable,
intuitive architecture is helpful in generating sitelinks. Also,
creating compelling, unique content or providing a useful service
(thus making your site highly relevant to user queries) can increase
the probability of sitelink generation — and thus your site
displaying sitelinks in search results!