Even though WordPress was originally built as a blogging platform, with many development deploys since then, it has now become a fully functional, robust content management system.

WordPress announced today that they won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Last year they weren’t even shortlisted within the top 5, however this year they are rubbing shoulders with Joomla and Drupal.

WordPress is an excellent CMS product for small and large businesses alike.  From a SEO perspective, most WordPress templates with a little bit of tweaking are search engine friendly, allowing search spiders to crawl the content of the site. The ‘All In One SEO Pack‘ is a useful plugin allowing meta data to be customized for each and every post.

The blogging functionality of the site allows website owner to post news, blog posts, media releases and more. Fresh content encourages search spiders to visit more often and thanks to WordPress, content can be added easily.

Congratulations WordPress on your win!

Yes it is true that our friends and friends of friends are sharing information, but it does feel like a barrage of noise some of the time.  It is a constant babble that is difficult to mine through and to find what is pertinent to you when you need it most.

Research shows that we are more likely to trust recommendations from friends than from a stranger or from a business who is trying to sell us something.  78% of people believe what other customers have to say about a product or service (Source: Edelman 2008).  If the customer happens to be one of your friends or a friend of a friend, then their recommendations, comments and research becomes even more believable.

Being called an “experiment”, we have just seen the launch of Google Social Search, a new search product that draws results from friends and friends of friends.  It’s currently available in Google Labs for anyone to try and comment upon.

Social Search results will only display when you are logged into your Google account.  When you conduct a search in Google, the algorithm draws upon the public content that is available from blogs you subscribe to, conversations on Twitter and activity from FriendFeed.

Results are displayed at the end of the page titled “Results from people in your social circle for [search-term]”.  This is also a link that filters results only from your social circle.  It can be refined further by clicking on the “people” links displayed within the “search options” column on the left hand side of results.

Google finds results from within your social circle within three ways.  The biggest way is your Google Public Profile if you have one.  It is a place where you can share with the world about who you are and list the social networks or social services that you belong to.  You have the control to share as much or little information as you like.  Google appears to be quite paranoid that users will think that they are losing their privacy.  They are going out of their way to communicate that users do have control over what they publish online, who they link to and who they connect with.

If you provide a link to your Twitter account, Google will go to the people you follow and their first level of people they follow to include any relevant content from their tweets within your Google search results.  I have not seen any relevant tweets appear within my social search results as yet, however, my Google profile does not have a link to my Keyword Intent Twitter account.

The second way Google extends your social circle is through your Google Chat buddies. The third way and so far, from my own search tests, appears that Google Reader is by far the largest source of content to be displayed from blogs or content sources you subscribe to.  This is likely due to me being a big Google Reader user and thus why I am seeing plenty of content from feeds.

For the average person though, it is unlikely that they are using Google Reader or even Twitter for that matter, even though it is growing in popularity.  It’s interesting that in Google’s release posts, they do not mention Facebook, but there has not been any public announcement of such a relationship between the two companies being established as yet.  Facebook, in my opinion, is used by the average Internet user.

It will be interesting to observe how Google Social Search may change the behavior of Twitter users, if it does at all.  Currently the behavior is to connect with as many people as possible, with the aim of having the largest number of followers.  But do you really want all and sundry social search results appearing with your normal search results if you are not really interested in those people in the first place?

I look forward to playing with this experiment a little longer and overall, I do like the appended results from friends and friends of friends, especially when I run of out time to read all of my blog feeds.  For me, Google Social Search highlights the importance of growing and maintaining connections within social networks like Twitter and also becoming a producer of original content.  Certainly, I would like my own public content to appear within others search results. It’s another viable way to generate traffic back to websites.

When I was in my final year at High School in 1990, the world wide web didn’t exist.  Search engines hadn’t been invented and the role of Search Engine Optimisation Consultant (SEO) hadn’t even been heard of.  Computer classes were barely on the school curriculum as it involved a group of 30 students surrounding a monitor and keyboard, each taking a turn to type basics on screen.  It was hardly the ABCs of computing.

My first full time job was at Queensland University of Technology as a computer assistant trainee.  The job was to backup humongous mainframes the size of three to six large refrigerators stuck together.  Each evening, we would pull out and insert new reels of tape.  Screeds of paper would spit out from the dot matrix printer with numbers and text that I did not understand.  All I had to do was find certain numbers and write them down in a book.  It was all very tedious which lead me to great boredom.

One day in 1991 I was introduced to “news groups” at the University.  To my delight, this kept me entertained for hours at a time.  I was amazed that people from the other side of the world would leave messages according to their topic of interest and others would respond.  I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of the Internet.  It was about people, connecting with one another, sharing information.  

The traineeship period came to an end.  I had to reapply for the role and when asked what my 5 year plan was, I insisted that I would be working in the film industry.  Naturally, my colleague, the other trainee, and who was also a German body builder whom ate two size 13 chickens for lunch every day, landed the role.
I didn’t miss the computer assistant role, but boy I missed News Groups and all those people around the world who were also interested in music, film and acting.

A few years had passed, after working in the film and tv industry and doing a stint of travel to Holland and the United Kingdom.  Finally back in Brisbane in 1994, I joined a small multimedia company called DVP Media where we were involved with bleeding edge technologies such as CD-I, CD-ROM and IBM video on-demand services.  Video production was required for the education training CD-ROMs we were creating, but later, the business was bought by Telecom New Zealand with a different strategy in mind.  Our new focus was the Internet… and in particular, we were tasked with building the first websites for Telecom Xtra, Yellow Pages, Wilson and Horton and more.

The process for creating multimedia and video productions paved the path for creating websites.  At that point, no one really knew what they were doing.  Together, along with other web agencies and individuals, we were creating the profession of website development.  We didn’t have project managers… we were called “web producers”.  We all stood in awe of watching graphics and text load onto Netscape Navigator 1.2 as we huddled around one of our lead writer’s computers.  Within days, we were all given the same access to explore the world wide web on the information super highway as we clicked away on hyper links (the greatest web invention of all time).

Search engines of the time were Alta Vista, Excite and Hot Bot.   Even though these search engines didn’t always bring back the results you were specifically looking for, I just accepted that was the way it was.  I didn’t question “is there a more accurate search engine”?  Our team was focused on building websites and did not correlate what we were doing, with what we were searching for online.  We did not ask “hey, how can we get our websites into search engines”?

Our preoccupation with “building” the website, was not unique.  Thousands of other web development agencies around the world were in the same boat.  Even today, this preoccupation with getting the job done exists in the minds of web designers and developers.  Web designers and developers are “creators”, so the thought of ensuring the website is found in search engines in most cases, is secondary to the launch of the site.

By the beginning of 1998, I started a web development agency with two others in Auckland called WEBENZ.  It was the same year that Google launched.  We had a team of designers, developers, project managers and account managers.  We prided ourselves on professionalism and delivering the best website possible for our clients that translated into real business results for them.  Unfortunately we kept on losing our staff to an outfit called Web Media.  They were hell bent on creating websites that were cool, utilising Flash animation…. and they were indeed incredibly cool.   I was still in my early 20’s and sometimes wished I worked there too.  Even though the temptation was there, we persevered with what we were doing.

Our philosophy was a little different.  We wanted to work with clients that wanted their website investment to translate into achieving their marketing goals such as online sales, phone calls, email newsletter subscribers and more.   Our websites were not cool.  They were highly functional and informative to the end user.  WEBENZ attracted clients who were not in the business of entertainment, but rather were retailers or small businesses who required a website to be their active sales person online.

Even though I proclaimed Hot Bot as being my favourite search engine, as soon as I started using Google, I forgot all about the other engines.  Pretty much, everyone had the same experience too.

Clients started to ask us about search engines and how they could get to the top of search results.  Again, being preoccupied with delivering websites, our 17 year old intern Tony Katavich was given the task of investigating how we could in fact get to the top.

Tony was a quirky character, and he prided himself on being so.  We all loved him for being that way.  We loved his cowboy hat, his love of wearing safety gear and his passion for treating search engines like a game.  Soon after, Tony reported back the secrets of natural search.  Just like the old days of News Groups, people were conversing online centred around the topic of search engines.  Emerging leaders in this space, and still are, were the likes of Danny Sullivan, a journalist dedicated to search engine news.  We would listen, gather information, tried the techniques and confirmed whether they worked or not.

Tony wasn’t a technical person.  He wasn’t a web designer or programmer.  His main strengths were his entrepreneurial spirit, his writing skills, his ability to communicate with people around the world online, his wicked sense of humour and his inquisitive trial and error learning style.  We discovered that those very cool flash animated sites would not get found within search engines at all.

Certain search phrases that were used within meta data and within the body copy of text on the site helped get rankings.  Sometimes we would even repeat the same word over and over again to get the ranking we wanted.  Later this became known as keyword stuffing and was a technique to spam the search engines.  Unbeknownst to us, we were involved in black hat (bad) and white hat (good) SEO techniques.   Most of the SEO that we did was optimisation of content, and mostly, the industry was focused on this.

No university or school in New Zealand or Australia offered any courses in search engine optimization or paid search placement during that time.  I felt a little embarrassed when university lecturers would ask us to write web marketing case studies for their text books, when we, at the time, did not have university qualifications.

SEO and pay per click advertising became a successful part of the business.  We used the same approach with affiliate marketing programs.  It became a cash cow and essentially was money for jam.  Even though this part of the business was taking off, the other half of the business of website design and build was struggling.  We were not very good at quoting, we always spent more time on the project than what we were getting paid for and we were losing a lot of cash every month.  Eventually we closed the business and the partners went in different paths.

Later I was asked to join Netconcepts, a leading SEO agency in NZ and US, with Stephan Spencer, Dave Cooper and Nigel Varcoe.  Very excited about this prospect, I jumped at the opportunity.  I learnt that SEO wasn’t all about content, but the way the site was constructed also played a huge part in pages being spidered and indexed by search engines.  I lead the SEO consulting team and together we worked with clients in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand, helping them to generate traffic to their sites through the natural search channel.

We found that technically optimised websites contributed to SEO success.  This included urls that needed to be clean and tidy, a site structure that was easy for spiders to follow and use of text based navigation, rather than images or flash animation.  Technical optimisation and content optimisation were two pieces of the organic search puzzle.

Although a SEO practitioner may not be a programmer as such, they need to know how websites are constructed and be able to speak tech speak with developers in order to educate them on how to build technically optimised sites.  Many web developers as mentioned previously are not aware of technical optimisation best practices due to being focused on their task at hand which is developing a website.

When a client technically optimised their site, the content that was being hidden to search spiders, opened up to be accessed.  Almost overnight, many clients experienced a 10 or 20 fold increase in their traffic.  For clients that did not have content, we educated and worked with their teams to create the type of content their target market actually search for online, thus matching information with search queries.

Over the years, the web has become extremely competitive.  In these situations, the third piece of SEO, “building authority” of the website is paramount.  This involves requesting and establishing relevant links from on-topic websites to communicate to search engine spiders that the client’s content is relevant.

Link building, as it is known, is not an easy task.  It is extremely time consuming, however it is worthwhile if implemented correctly.  Persistence, communication and relationship building is key.  Link building is a type of Online PR.  To build links naturally, a website most focus on being the best site it can be with a splash of originality.  If people like your site, if they find it useful, entertaining or make them feel as though they belong, they will link to it from their blogs and social networks.

Sometimes when I see job ads for web developers, they are often asked to also be SEO experts.  Asking a person to have excellent development skills, writing skills, relationship building and negotiation skills, creativity and entrepreneurialism is a tall order.  Having all these skills in one package is quite rare.  I’m sure that some of these people do exist, but more often than not, these people are working for themselves, because they can make more money doing that, than working for the man.

Google was launched in September 1998 and a whole industry has been born out of this invention. There was a saying in the early days of the web that the Internet was like dog years.  Every three months equalled one year.  It was fast moving and something new was being launched every day.  For those in the industry, search engines like Google undergo continual change on a daily basis.  Sometimes we don’t even appreciate the amount of change that is taking place and we do take it for granted.  The old boys are jaded and it takes a lot to impress them.

The Internet and SEO has been the majority of my working life and even though I feel that I’ve been in the game for quite a while now, the profession itself is relatively new.  The SEO profession requires maturity, particularly with tools and methodologies.  For most, the humble spreadsheet is the tool of choice for SEO management and at times, this limits efficiency and accuracy.

When my teacher at high school asked me what I was going to do with my life, I had no idea that I would become an SEO Consultant.  SEO didn’t exist.  What has contributed to my own success online is the culmination of all my experiences and interests.  Even though I’m not an actor, I speak at public events about SEO.  Even though I am not a programmer, I speak their language and we understand each other.  Even though I’m not a film producer, I have produced online videos to be found within video search and written articles to assist with link building objectives.  Even though I no longer sell lemonade to my neighbours (like I did when I was a kid), my entrepreneurialism helps me help my clients sell more online.

Yusuf Mehi, Microsoft Bing Engineer

The next round of Bing development is a result of studying users’ search behaviour.  Internet users are becoming more sophisticated with their search queries.  Search users are changing and moving beyond the “keyword to url” mapping search function.  Mehi and his team found that;

• 25% of all clicks lead to the “back” button on the browser
• 42% of search queries need refinement
• 50% of user search sessions are spent on longer queries.

Short queries, mapping keyword query to url, takes approximately 1-2 minutes.  More complex search queries can last as long as 30mins per search session with people looking to solve a sophisticated problem such as buying a product, finding specific health information or where to go out on a Saturday night.

Currently only available to US residents at www.bing.com/visualsearch, Microsoft launched today Bing’s Visual Search product.  It provides a graphical way to search and discover information.

When searching for a digital camera for example, Bing displays a “Visualize Digital Cameras” link next to the search results. After clicking this link, a rolling cascade of digital cameras is displayed.  While scrolling through the different products, the user is also able to refine their search query by clicking relevant links such as Type, Model, Optical Zoom and other specifications.

Bing's Visual Search - Searching for a digital camera

With Bing, Microsoft is aiming to help users perform simple key tasks within the Travel, Shopping, Health and Local Search categories.  Although, Bing’s visual search engine is not limited to these categories alone.  Bing also presents Popular Galleries, allowing users to select the best of movies, books, celebrities, sport, politicians and more.

Mehi accidently slipped that Bing will introduce “Twitter” results in the not too distant future.

Other fast moving retail search terms included:

“swimming pools” (3rd)
“air conditioning units” (4th)
“air conditioning” (7th)
“fans” (8th)
“air conditioner” (12th)

The chart below shows that the seasons certainly do have an impact on our search behavior and buying habits. You can see that the traffic for these search terms have been the highest since 2006.  (Closer to 0% is higher than 0.015%)

As an SEO consultant, I would have to agree with Rob.  I’ve been working with a few publishers recently and what makes their headlines so magnetizing and hooks people into reading their articles, are at risk of blandness.

A message that I have heard so often in the SEO industry, is that we are to optimize our websites not only for search engine spiders, but also for humans. Real people folks. Those that feel real emotions when they laugh, cry, shout or grumble when they read or watch something that touches them.

The balance between SEO and creativity is being lost.  Being too far one sided with “keyword rich” content will surely miss the point of what we are trying to achieve.  In most cases, our goal is to generate qualified traffic that converts into an action such as buying a product, subscribing to an email newsletter and even generating repeat usage through brand engagement.

An audience member or customer will only want to establish a longer term relationship with a brand should it be engaging and touch the core of what is relevant to them.

Unlike PPC, a tap that turns traffic on when you shovel money into the Google slot machine, the purpose of SEO is to generate sustainable business.  Sustainability for websites, whether it be a blog, a newspaper or ecommerce site, is to ensure that when people arrive on those sites, they want to return again.

Can SEO and creativity go hand in hand?

Sure they can!  SEO is both a science and an art.  If SEO leans towards science too much, you will certainly loose the sparkle that makes a piece of content go viral.  We want people to find our content, click on it, enjoy it and spread it around the world to like-minded friends.

Getting our pages ranked within search engines is only the first part of the challenge.  On a search engine rankings page of 10 possible listings a person could click on, I want them to click on my website or that of my client’s.  Content headlines need to include both SEO and creativity.  A well written, intriguing headline will certainly get more clicks than one that is optimized purely from a robotic perspective.

Winning the click, is the second part of the challenge.  A quirky headline that is also optimized for search engines, increases the chance of that listing being clicked. Keyword rich content that is also highly engaging and thought provoking, increases the chance of people blogging and linking back to that piece of content. Natural link building, is the best form of inbound links and is an integral aspect of SEO.

Even if there is a homogenous trend happening in the SEO industry, it needn’t be that way. SEO guys and gals need to step up with their creativity.  I for one am not the most creative or the best writer, however, by engaging creatives who can make a piece of content stand out amongst the rest, are certainly worth their weight in gold.

SEOs and creatives make highly effective teams, however, balance is the key.

Lisa Barone attended SMX Advanced in early June and during a Q&A session with Matt Cutts, an official spokesperson for Google, found that he (or Google) does not support PageRank Sculpting. This doesn’t mean however, that your site will get penalized if you have implemented PageRank Sculpting on it.

Essentially Google is saying that PageRank Sculpting is not useful anymore and that it is better use of one’s time to fix the website’s architecture in the first place.

PageRank Sculpting is a technique where a nofollow tag is applied to internal links within the site to prevent spiders from crawling or passing PageRank from one page to another. If you had 10 links on the site and half of them are nofollowed, then the theory is that all the PageRank will flow to the 5 that have no nofollow tags.  This essentially boosts the importance of the pages that have not been nofollowed and increases the chances of them ranking in search results.

Matt Cutt says, “Your leftover PageRank will now evaporate”. Essentially you can’t direct PageRank where you want it to go. PageRank Sculpting just isn’t effective anymore. It is far more effective to create new content for your website, rather than bend and shape the flow of PageRank.

In my opinion, it is best to follow Matt Cutt’s advice.   I would rather focus my energy and time on developing a great website that has engaging content and has useful functionality. This will grab the attention of users and the media who will want to share it with other like minded people.

Dave in the Philippines asks…

“If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time, or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?”

Response by Matt Cutts:

I think in most cases, especially if it is high quality content, I would just unleash the 100 pages. If you are talking about 10,000 or 100,000 or a million pages, you might be a little more cautious. It’s not like this would cause any automatic penalty, but if Google sees a site that was nothing the other day and then suddenly there are 4 million pages in the index, then this could be the sort of thing where someone (from Google) will take a look at the site to confirm if it is legitimate content or automated junk that has not added value.

So, 100 pages I would not worry about, but I would make sure it is high quality content. A lot of times when you create content organically, you’ll end up with a page at a time, so go ahead and publish it when you have the new page. You do not have to wait until you have a lot of different content and batch it up and release it. It is okay to release it a page at a time. Especially if it is small scale or high quality content, I wouldn’t worry about it.

www.bing.com

A longer post is coming soon.

Microsoft believes that 42% of all first query searches need to be refined which presents a huge opportunity. The goal of Bing is to reduce the time involved with searching by providing better results the first time round. They will do this by displaying related categories to help provide a better user search experience.   For example, Bing will provide related categories such as Reviews and Prices for product related searches.  Finding exactly what you are looking for within a shorter amount of time is quite compelling if Microsoft can pull it off. 

The question remains, since Google provides a great search experience and is adequate, will users switch to a better engine?  Is a better search experience on another engine just frills that the masses won’t switch for?

In any case, the web needs Microsoft’s Bing to succeed.  Even though Google is not technically a monopoly, it dominates most markets around the world and is certainly beginning to feel like one.  Google still demonstrates its ability to innovate, specifcally with its recent Rich Snippets release and support of RDFa and Microformats.  However, we need competition in the search industry as it provides choice for users and stimulates innovation.  It is obvious that Google’s new use of data was spurred on by competitive moves by Wolfram Alpha.   These new services by Google is proof that competition ensures that the encumbent keeps on innovating.

Can Microsoft innovate to a level that keeps Google on its toes?  I hope so.  There are plenty of smart people who work for Microsoft.  Contrary to popular belief, the brightest people in the world do not all work for Google. Let’s hope that the Microsoft Bing team have the ability to experiment and develop search technologies that can make a difference.