One of the first things you should look at is whether or not the PHP framework actually has room for expansion. While it might not suit your situation at the moment, what happens if your company expands, or if you need extra functionality from your site?

You should always be planning for the future. The more modular a PHP framework, the better it’s going to suit you down the road.

One of the other items you should look at is how easy it to switch to that PHP framework? Are the coding styles between it and your current site similar? It can be very hard to simply change around things such as the way you do your “foreach” or “if else” statements – just try to keep everything similar between the main framework and your custom code.

Lots of the time many frameworks will actually have a certain coding style that they like to follow, especially if you plan on selling your custom modules back into their systems.

Now the other thing you should look at is their folder structure – as programmers we often have our own specific style, and with frameworks we kind of need to stick to what the framework coders have actually put into place.

One of the next items we should look is support – is there a highly built community around this? Are there a lot of other developers that can help us if we run into issues? Does the company offer anything such as one-on-one support? Will they also do paid customizations for us? These are all things we should ask before we start purchasing a PHP framework.

Finally, one of the last things I want to touch on are the modules that the system might have – as we discussed, it’s best if the PHP framework has modularity to it. Now, some of the things we want to look at are that we want to see – are there any current modules that we can use to save ourselves trouble down the road and that aren’t reinventing the wheel?If there aren’t any modules that suit us right now, can they be easily programmed by other programmers, by ourselves, or by the company itself?

If you have any other questions about choosing the best PHP framework, please feel free to contact us and we’d be more than happy to work with you.

Now there are many other factors that come into determine what best content management suits you and your company’s needs.

These items would be – does it do everything your company needs to do? There’s nothing worse than starting off with a content management system, and then three years down the road or even six months down the road, you have to redo everything just because you can’t convert from one content management system to another.

So take a look at all the features in the content management systems you’re analyzing, and determine if it has enough room for you to grow in the future.

Now, you can have simple content management systems that simply allow you to enter pages, attach YouTube videos, do a little bit of SEO with it, or you can have full-blown content management systems which allow you to grow in the future and add items such as forums, lead opt-in forums, newsletter systems and multiple things like that. In some cases these might be overkill.

Another thing to consider is the ease of use of a system. If you take multiple popular content management system such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla and compare those, you’ll find differences in the usability. Many people find WordPress to be the easiest out of all WordPress, Drupal has better permissions and better security options, and Joomla has a lot of expansion, but you can really get lost with it easily.

There are also custom content management solutions out there, such as our own Fast Track Sites content management system. Now, ours is a more simplifiedoption that easily integrates with our other products, and that’s the kind of the market that it targets there; whereas WordPress is kind of a general overall one that you can expand about as far as the eye can see.

So that’s it – again, basically the content management system is one that matches your business, is easy to use, and you actually use it.

What we’re going to talk about today is actually managing multiple WordPress websites using a simple plug-in. Now, as we’ve discussed, it’s actually very difficult to manage multiple sites on your own or even just a small team of going out and logging into each one—it’s very time-consuming, and some people might just let those sites sit there, but the reason you want to do your updates is that you don’t want your site getting hacked, you want to get those new features.

Now, most options that allow you to manage these sites from a single platform usually consist of a single plug-in that goes on your WordPress sites and then a master system that actually lets you log-in and handle these updates. There are multiple solutions; some of them are hosted on other people’s servers, but we really prefer to actually have the software on our own server where we can control it, make sure all of our data is here and not getting sent off, or basically opening up our customer’s data to additional security features that a foreign server might have.

The one we usually suggest to people is called InfiniteWP, from InfiniteWP.com. This system, first off—it looks great. That doesn’t say too much about a system, but if you’re going to use a system day in and day out, it’s important that the functionality is really there and it’s easy to use, and of course looking great is always a plus for that. Also another great feature is that it’s free. You can actually get a free version of it, you can install it on multiple sites, have a main system on your server, and you’re not paying any extra. Now, there are extra features that you may want to get and those extra features do cost money, but the base system is still free.

The main features of InfiniteWP is you log-in once to a main platform, and that automatically gives you access to all the systems that you’ve set up within that platform. You can do one-click updates across all sites or you can do updates per site, per theme, per plug-in. You can also back-up and restore a system very quickly. You can manage the themes and plug-ins across the sites from within the central location. It’s expandable—as I’ve said, there are multiple plug-ins you can add. You can even white-label the system and have your own branding on it, if you have somebody else logging into it or the plug-in that’s actually on the client’s side, it won’t just say “InfiniteWP,” you can make it “MyCompany’s” “Backup” or “Management Solution” plug-in.

Now, again, this is the one that we recommend. There are tons of plug-ins out there that do this, so as always, do your own research, and decide what the best fit is for your company.

With recent changes to Google (I know we’ve covered this before) they’ve really gone to a more social-search attitude. What this means is basically the links that your friends have liked or +1’d—and I’m not sure if Bing and Yahoo are going to follow this, but Google definitely—looks at what your friends have liked and +1’d, and they actually show those as higher links on your searches, and also have information saying who did the +1 or the like.

The reason why that’s important is if you have a very large following or you get a lot of people to actually like and follow your content, you not only get ranked higher, but you also increase a lot of other items, too, and one of those items is your brand visibility. It’s going to get your name out to thousands and thousands of people, most of whom you’ve never met, might not even be in the same city or might even be in different areas that you might not have looked into targeting before.

Now, the traffic you’re going to get can range from a pretty wide-spread traffic; someone shared a link with somebody else who shared a link, or can be really targeted traffic, someone searching for your company or the niche that you’re in and found you that way. You can also do paid advertising on most of these social media sites, and a lot of these are really heavily targeted. You can get down into the demographics, who you’re looking to target, get very, very deep into that and usually the cost-per-click and the cost for advertising is pretty cheap compared to what you normally get—but most of the time with pay-per-click advertising, it’s kind of just a blast method. You don’t know who you’re getting in front of, but with certain sites like this you can get that cheap traffic that’s highly targeted, which is what you’re specifically looking after.

A lot of people have probably wondered, “Well, is it really important that I actually do have a social media presence? What do I actually get out of it? How many people will actually see my stuff?” Most of these social media sites have a very, very large user database, and the traffic that they see each day is just amazing. We don’t have the figures per-day for traffic, but this last week (on the 15^th of December, 2012) Facebook got 1.99 billion visits last well. That’s almost 2 billion visits during that single week. Most websites just aren’t going to see that kind of traffic. Twitter got 67 million, LinkedIn got 23 million, Google+ got 22 million and one that a lot of people don’t really think about being a social media site is YouTube.

We’ve talked before about ranking on YouTube and we’ll probably dig deeper into it in future articles, but YouTube got 709 million visitors last week. That’s more than Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and most of the other sites combined. Now, ranking on YouTube is, again, a lot easier than ranking on a lot of the other social sites. You get not only views based on that and social signals, you also get links back to your site, back links within your videos—it’s a very powerful tool.

With all your social media endeavors, you basically have to determine: what’s the final goal that you want? Are you really looking to have buyers come to your site? Do you have any products that want to be purchased? Do you really just want to get your name out there? Get people talking about you? Do you have an actual store that you want people to come in and visit? All that’s really important whenever you start digging into this.

A couple quick tips on basically how to use social media—you really want to engage your visitors, ask questions, post often, and if somebody asks a question to you, make sure you reply back pretty quickly and in-depth. Ask the people on your sites to share you out, share information with your visitors, things that you might feel are important to them. Another thing is offering seminars. Everyone likes something for free. It’s not always possible and especially if you don’t exactly have a product that you’re selling or if your product is very expensive, but simple things really get people to like your site and they keep coming back for more. A lot of companies are built around this basis; they have weekly sweepstakes, different things like that. The really important part is that’s getting people to your site, getting them engaged, teaching them more about your company and what you offer, and by doing that, you’re going to get those repeat visitors back over and over and over again.

That is pretty much it on the tips that we’re going to offer right now—there’s a lot more information out there, I really suggest a lot of people do research and by all means, feel free to contact us. We’d be happy to discuss social media marketing, how to create a plan to implement social media marketing for your company, how to make them work best for you.

The way that we usually suggest for people to get around this is a multi-staked process. The first step is going to be planning, and then you implement your plan, assess how your plan actually worked, and you can repeat that process. So that first stage of planning, what you really want to do is basically start out and map out exactly what you want to actually happen. Do you want to increase those clicks? Do you want to get people purchasing products? What exactly would be the purpose of your SEO here?

Now, just as most business will fail without a business plan, most SEO will also fail without an SEO plan. So once you’ve got your goal in mind, the next thing you want to look at is your keywords. If you’re looking to sell something on your site, you want to look at buyer keywords, such as “buy product X,” “product X download,” “product X reviews,” these are buyer keywords—people are going to be typing this into Google, Bing or Yahoo, whenever they’re actually looking towards buying something. Now, if you’re looking to just garner customers in, you might have to start with article keywords, but the main thing you want to do is look at the competition, make sure people are actually searching for these keywords before you spend all your time optimizing for something that you just won’t get any traffic from.

Now, once you’ve got your keywords in there, you want to start looking at your on-page optimization; getting your site ready for the next stage. You want to make sure you’ve got your keyword usage on your homepage, within articles from the site. The number one tip (I should say) on how to optimize your site for specific keywords is to really make sure you’re writing for the visitor, not necessarily for search engines, just putting your keyword in there and spamming it over and over again. You really want to engage your readers, no matter what your site is about.

Once you’ve got your keyword, on its actual place, you want to have them on your internal pages and your homepage, and then you want to make sure you’ve got your internal link structure correct. Are you linking to your internal pages from other pages—from your homepage, from a sitemap page—for a great kind of web effect, interlinking all your content together.

Now, once you’ve got all your on-page optimization on, you want to move onto your off-page. These days, again, Google, Yahoo and Bing are all going towards a more social style search algorithm, so you want to make sure you’ve got social media links coming to your site, social bookmarking, some Google+ plusses, some Facebook likes—you also want to kind of diversify yourself there, so take your keyword phrases, utilize them on articles that you might have off somewhere, maybe through guest blogs or article directories. Make sure you’ve got a few good high-PR web directories pointing to you. The main thing is to make sure that you’re getting links from authoritative websites, sites that really deal with your keywords. While other links do help, these ones help a lot more.

Once you’ve got your plan in place, it’s time to actually implement that plan. If you just leave your plan sitting around, it’s not going to do any good. So actually follow through, start implementing your plan stage by stage and once you’re done there, you’re ready to move onto the next step.

The next step is assessing—you want to take a look and every time you’re changing, it’s possible your competition is also changing, so you don’t want to just get tunnel vision and focus on just our plans. Stay with it, all the way through. You want to implement it, then assess how it’s doing—so has our competition changed? Are our keywords still valid? Is our product that we’re trying to sell even being utilized anymore? Do people still actually want this product? And basically, all-in-all, we just want to make sure that our plan is actually working, it’s still valid.

Moving on to the next step, should we repeat that same plan, or should we start over with a new plan—now, keep on going through that entire cycle. As I said, it’s a very time-intensive process. You’ve got to actually go out there, find those proper high-PR page authority sites to actually get those links back to you. Sometimes creating a plan without knowing much about how to do it can be difficult, or you might waste your time by doing something that you’re not really sure about. So the best bet is to talk to an actual SEO professional—SEO is constantly changing, so it’s best to constantly work with someone who’s constantly also learning as SEO is changing.

Now, in order to begin, we should first look at our keywords. I want to make sure that our keywords actually target those specific areas. Good examples of that would be, for a plumber in College Station, Texas, our keyword phrase itself would be “plumber College Station Texas.” Now, some people might be asking why we don’t do “plumber and College Station Texas.” Most of the time, those two keywords will be the same, however, it’s good to actually compare those two against one another in say, the Google Adwords tool, because you might find that adding the word “and” can actually get you worse rankings or less searches, so it’s really good to compare those two to determine what works best for you. For our example we will be using “plumber College Station Texas.”

Now, whenever you do your search within the Google Adwords tool or any other keyword tool that you’re using, again, compare the two and also do a search for just your keyword itself. Depending on the keyword you’re trying to target, it might be better to actually target just the general keyword instead of one specifically tailored to your city. You want to make sure to pay attention to the actual number of searches, both globally and locally, depending on the keyword type.

Now, once you determine your keywords, you want to look at optimizing your internal pages. All the usual rules of regular SEO apply to local SEO, so you want to locate a keyword density of 3%—you don’t want to have too much, otherwise your page can appear as spam. If possible, you want to have your keyword twice in the title of the page. If your keyword is too long, that might not be possible. You also want to have your keyword twice in your description, usually towards the beginning and towards the end, and inside the body of your page, you want to have one of your keywords bold, and you also want to have it italicized if possible—this is just adding more ranking factors. You also want to make sure it’s appearing within your H1 tags, and if you also have H2 to H6 tags within the page, try to put your keywords in there, too. Again, just make sure it doesn’t look like spam.

Now, linking to this page, you want to make sure you have links to it from your homepage and from any kind of blog post concerning that subject—that way, you have a good internal link structure. And finally, since we are doing local SEO, we do want to have our address on the site. As we get further in to our local SEO optimization, that address is really going to come into play. Now, you can just simply put your address in the site, but it’s much better if you use the vCard style tags on the site, as it’s going to be better optimized.

Now, the next thing we want to look at is we want to get ourselves on Google Local, or how it’s referred to, Google Places. You want to have a listing for each of your locations, and for each of those locations, you want to have all the information [0:03:18.3 in, image] and not only just your name and the description of your business, you want to have your hours, your website, your phone-number, and most importantly, the address, so whenever searches actually happen, it relates it to that specific address.

The next item on the list after that is you want to get into website directories such as dmoz, the Yahoo directory, or any other directory specifically tailored not only to your business, but to the location of your business.

Now, there’s a lot of information that’s not listed here, and there’s a lot more that we can go over with you, so in order to get more information, please feel free to contact one of our SEO pros today. We’d love to sit down and talk with you about local SEO.

As we mentioned, WordPress has a large development community—there are more developers for WordPress than many of the other CMSs out there, which in turn means that there are more plug-ins and more themes available to choose from. WordPress is also expandable. Utilizing those pre-built plug-ins and themes, you can quickly build an entire website in just a matter of minutes, and have more functionality than with a custom website that would take several days. Also, WordPress is optimized for SEO, usually out of the box, and most themes have extra optimization built in—and if they don’t, there are also plug-ins out there, such as SEO Ultimate and All-in-One SEO, which actually allow you to go in, create custom META tags such as the META tag title, META tag descriptions, as well as doing the individual on-page optimization, double-checking for broken links, and various other items that are necessary for SEO.

Again, we choose WordPress because of all of these above options. To learn more about WordPress or many of the other content management systems out there, including our own custom content management system, and what works best for each situation, it’s best to contact an experienced web-professional. If you contact us today, we’d be more than happy to sit down with you and discuss WordPress or any other questions you might have.

Page authority is how closely a site is related to your niche or your site. Now, a good example of this would be a lawyer website; it’s not exactly the same as a flower website, so they’re not exactly related. Now, if you had two lawyers linking to one another, that would be great page authority between those two. Now, with the recent Panda and Penguin updates, page authority is a major ranking factor. Many sites suffered extreme drops in their rankings to page authority. Many sites are lacking proper links from proper page authority websites. Lots of websites had been using forum links, just constant spamming procedures in order to actually get their ranks higher.

Now, in order to actually get higher page rankings, you need to have better page authority. In order to implement this strategy and get those better links, what we need to do is find related sites to our niche or our website. Going back to our previous example, if we have a lawyer in Tampa Bay, if we have another lawyer that’s in Miami, those two sites would have great page authority to each other, not only because they’re both lawyer websites, but they’re also in that same area of Florida.

Now, another way of doing this would be to do articles on your subject. Whenever you create an article—again, let’s go to flower shop. If we create an article on the best flowers for summer and then we create another article, the best flowers for winter and we post those on an outside site and link back to our current website, then we’re going to have a higher page authority coming from that link. Another way to do this would be press releases.

Now, whenever you write these articles or press releases, it’s very important to make sure you have the proper keyword density and that you’re targeting the proper keywords that are related to your niche that are going to give that site page authority. Now, something even better would be if you can find another flower shop that would be willing to let you write a guest blog post, and then link them back to your own site. That’d be even more powerful than the previously mentioned ways. Now, with the changes to page authority, that does not mean that other links no longer count. Other links do count; the only difference is that page authority links or authority links count more.

Now, in closing, page authority is a major change in the way SEO is being played out, so in order to get the proper benefit for page authority sides, what you’ll need to do is go in and try to plan out an entire strategy and then make sure you have everything done on paper before you actually go out and start creating those links. It’s very important to get things right; you don’t want to waste a lot of time in getting the site links that just really aren’t important or don’t have a high page authority. If you have any questions, you can call and speak with one of our SEO professionals about page authority today or any of the other SEO training material that we offer.