Local Biz Blogs Official Blog

We updated LocalBizBlogs with our latest code early this morning when you were asleep. This update brings many new features to your BizBlog and some under-the-hood performance tweaks. Let's take a look.

Send to Mobile - Now visitors can send themselves an SMS text message with your business information directly to their mobile phone. The message contains the business name, phone number, city, state, zip, and BizBlog URL.

Ping Google and Technorati - Each blog post you publish now sends an automatic notification to Google and Technorati. This will get your posts indexed faster and help your page rank.

Bookmark & Share - Allows visitors to bookmark individual blog posts or your entire BizBlog. Supports 34 different social bookmark websites, including Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and Del.icio.us.

Text Formatting Removal - We've added two buttons to your blog's formatting bar that will simplify your postings. Paste as Plain Text allows you to remove formatting from text you want to paste into your blog. Paste from Word does the same, but is designed to work specifically with text from Microsoft documents.

Counts and Arrows - Now both the Menu Tool and the Goods & Services Tool display the number of items within each category. We have also added golden arrows next to each category to prompt visitors to click inside.

That's it for this update. As always, we value your feedback. Contact us if you have questions about your BizBlog or discover a bug in our system. Your input helps us build a better service. Thanks!

BizTags are words that describe key aspects of your business. They help users narrow their search for the type of businesses they're looking for.

Users can browse BizTags in the BizBlog Directory. If I'm looking for a videographer for my wedding, I may click on BizTags like 'video', 'videography', or 'DVD'.

When choosing BizTags, think of words used to describe your business. Think like your customers here. What would they type into a search engine to find your kind of business? Don't forget location information. It's wise to include the region and towns/cities you cover.

Make sure your tags are properly formatted. Each tag can contain multiple words, but stay away from using all caps and special characters like &, !, and $.

The most important thing to remember is that all BizTags must be separated by a comma. If you don't separate tags with a comma you'll end up with one really long tag, which defeats the purpose.

Here is an example of what BizTags a picture framing business might use:

To add or edit BizTags associated with your business, login to your BizBlog and locate the BizTag section in the left column. You are limited to 15 BizTags, so choose your words wisely.

The first three BizTags will also appear in the page title. So place your most significant BizTags as the first three in the list. We found that search engines give a lot of weight to page titles and including your top three BizTags can make a difference in your page rank.

Today we're launching a handful of new features. Drum roll please?

Business Icons

Now every business has an icon image. It displays on the top left of your BizBlog and on other areas of the site where your business may appear, like the homepage or BizBlog Directory. Add your logo or an image that represents your business.

Captcha Verification

Posting comments just got easier. Now users don't have to check their email to verify a comment. We've introduced a captcha system where the user is asked to type in the words they see. This speeds up the comment process and helps prevent spam.

A cool sidenote: Our specific captcha system is called reCAPTCHA. It generates misspelled words from books that are being digitized for the Internet Archive project. Every time a user types the captcha word, they are helping to correct errors in some of the world's most famous books. You never know, that comment you're leaving might help bring Salinger online!

New Dashboard

The Dashboard has a new look. We've integrated it into the header and simplified the categories into a few tabs.

More features and improvements coming soon. The Beta program is near completion. New businesses Join Now and get 3 free months of service when BizBlog 1.0 is launched.