Scott wrote a song for the occasion, called “Using WordPress as a CMS”. Check out the video, there’s a studio version of the song coming out soon:

Using Wordpress as a CMS from Charles Williams on Vimeo.

Mark Jackson (no, he’s not related to Michael Jackson) was recently interviewed about Twitter search.

Lately, there has been a lot of hype about Twitter search being a rival for Google search. Twitter still has a lot of ways to go, and it’s very “gameable”. Twitter’s search is based on how fresh your tweet is. In there future, we expect that there will be more algorithmic changes to Twitter search. Twitter needs to address the holes in their search results if they’re ever going to be a rival for Google search and able to index the “real time web”.

When it comes to Twitter Search, for example, there are some indications lately that they are making some changes. For example, when it comes to profile searches, and you have a keyword in your profile,Twitter may be ranking your profile based on the number of followers you have. If someone else comes along later and establishes their account on Twitter and adds that same keyword to their profile, Twitter Search will show the profile that has more followers.

Twitter Search still has a long way to go until they can even think about being a rival for Google. But, certainly, if you want to know what people are talking about on Twitter right now, take a look at Twitter’s trending topics.

Attendees to learn how to use WordPress as a Content Management System

Dallas, Texas — WordPress Plugin developer Scott Kingsley Clark of Vizion Interactive (www.VizionInteractive.com) will present “WordPress as a CMS: How to Unleash the Dragon” at the WordCamp Dallas 2009 conference to be held on Saturday, June 27 and Sunday, June 28, 2009 at the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson, Texas.

Mr. Clark has been a strong proponent of utilizing WordPress as a content management system for many years. Along with his beliefs, Mr. Clark has been an active contributor in the WordPress community, providing many free, useful and helpful plug-ins for others who are using WordPress.

“Our company is honored to have Scott Kingsley Clark speaking at WordCamp. Scott will have the opportunity to provide his insight and experiences of using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) on a daily basis and share some of the Plugins that he has developed,” said Vizion Interactive President/CEO Mark Jackson.

This two-day event is designed for those with a passion for WordPress – users, designers, developers and anyone else who is interested in learning the latest about this ever growing platform. Attendees also get a chance to network with some of the best known leaders in the field – including Matt Mullenweg, founder of the WordPress platform and Automattic.

About Scott Kingsley Clark
A Web Developer since the age of 15, Scott has worked with hundreds of websites through the years. In November 2007, Scott joined forces with Vizion Interactive. Scott specializes in PHP Development using primarily MySQL, AJAX, and JavaScript and is the Architect behind Vizion Interactive’s iMarketingManager.com utility.

About Vizion Interactive
Vizion Interactive, Inc. is a search engine optimization, search engine marketing, website design, Interactive marketing, and social media marketing agency dedicated to empowering clients to make informed decisions that deliver measurable results. Vizion Interactive’s headquarters are in Dallas, Texas with regional offices in Overland Park, Kansas and Clearwater Beach, Florida.

While this may not be new to those who were able to first explore this offering beginning June 2nd, I just received access to it and I am extremely happy with it. I think that the information made available is insightful, actionable and paints a great picture for how your local listings are performing. Let’s also not forget that ultimately it is much easier than digging through Google Analytics for minimal local listing performance data.

To start off, the dashboard provides the same top-level data of impressions vs. clicks. To some, this may be seen as the most critical data to assess. This is the first indicator that your local business listing is not captivating or that you are marketing to the wrong audience. However, seeing this in the past as effective due to a high click-to-impression/action ratio may have been misleading for those who title their location solely with their brand. Where Google Local took this pre-existing feature further was to show impressions and actions but break out exactly what actions are taking place. As illustrated in the image below, now you are able to assess how may searchers chose to see more info on your listing, request driving directions or chose visit your website. It is also beneficial that the dashboard also allows you to choose custom reporting time periods.

The next new feature of the dashboard report is the “Top Search Queries” section. Here we can see what search engine keyword phrase queries are driving the most impressions. Now while you do not have the information as to which queries drove actions, it is nice to see where you are showing up. With this information in mind, see if you are getting impressions for keyword terms related to your market focus. If so, this is a great tool to use in refining your listings for the impressions you are already residing within. Instead of having to fully optimize your listings, your listings simply need to be polished.

Lastly, another great offering is the section which indicates by zip code identification which listing visitors requested driving directions. This in itself can be used as a tool for offline marketing as well as within your online efforts. Knowing where a lot of your interested parties are located allows you to fine tune you offline advertising efforts to a certain locality. Knowing where your foot traffic is coming also allows you to provide added usability on-site by providing specific driving directions from these areas. If located within a large city, this specific data gives you the need to re-assess your keyword research at a suburb level as well. While city data is available in Google Analytics and other analytical packages, I have yet to see it at a zip code level.

All in all, Google Local Business Center has really made me happy with the integration of this expanded reporting information. While some of this data can be assessed by digging around in Google Analytics, is is nice to have a clean and concise report available for each individual listing you have.

If you have not been keeping up with the latest Search Engine Optimization developments when it comes to Google PageRank, PageRank Sculpting, and the NoFollow Tag, then this blog post is probably for you. And even if you have been attempting to keep up with it all, then let this blog post serve as an “overview” of what’s going on, and the changes that you may or may not need to make to your website to improve its search engine optimization.

First, you will probably want to go over to Matt Cutts’ Blog (Matt Cutts is a Google Search guru, he works for Google) and read his recent blog post about PageRank Sculpting and how it can effect the Search Engine Optimization of your website. Well, at least that’s what he has titled his blog post. I believe that it’s actually not a very good title for that blog post, especially because it covers a lot more than “PageRank Sculpting”.

After reading Matt Cutts’ blog post, I’ve pulled out the most important points that you need to pay attention to, especially when it comes to search engine optimization and optimizing your website for the search engines:

– Google is doing a lot of very sophisticated link computation. And it is very different than what the original PageRank papers say.
– There is a decay factor. You could estimate that about 10-15% of the PageRank disappears even before it can be passed to an outgoing link.
– The Nofollow tag is a method to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, NoFollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchor text. Matt Cutts says that Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank and Nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.
– Google changed how they count NoFollow links, probably due to the fact that certain website owners were trying to influence how PageRank flows in their site.
– Matt Cutts does not recommend PageRank Sculpting.
– It is more important to create great content that will attract links.
– Use a website architecture that makes your site usable and crawlable for humans and for the search engines.
– Put the most important web pages on your site “front and center” so people and the search engines can see them.

I personally have never been a fan of “PageRank Sculpting” and trying to manipulate which web pages on your site the search engines should pay more attention to. If the page is important, and you’re adding it as a link on your website for a human to follow, then you have to assume that the search engines might follow it, right? Well, that’s what we’re hearing from Google’s Matt Cutts now: they have changed the way they deal with the NoFollow tag, so it appears that PageRank Sculpting is not necessary anymore. They don’t say it officially, but they may be ignoring the NoFollow tag, at least part of it.

What’s more important than knowing about how Google treats PageRank Sculpting and the NoFollow tag, though, are these points:
– Google changed other, larger aspects of how they look at links. They did it a while back and not too many people noticed.
– A better, more effective form of PageRank Sculpting is choosing which things to link to from your home page.
– Whenever you’re linking around within your site: don’t use the NoFollow tag.
– There are some cases where you might consider adding the NoFollow tag, like to pages that change often or require a login. Still, you might consider adding those URLs to the robots.txt file rather than adding a NoFollow tag to the links.
– Do not attempt to hoard your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Make note of this: parts of Google’s algorithm encourages links to good websites. You will rank better in the Google if you link out to trusted, authoritative websites that Google already likes. In fact, I have been personally recommending that whenever you make a blog post, make sure that you do your research first and link out to a few trusted websites on the subject. Why not search Google and link out to a few sites that already rank well?

Linking out is a good thing for search engine optimization. That’s why, for example, I am linking out to a few sites towards the beginning of this blog post: note the wikipedia link and the link to the “Anatomy of a Search Engine” (Google PageRank paper) link.

So, what’s the bottom line? You need to take a look at your website’s internal linking structure and your overall site structure and consider that Google is probably ignoring the NoFollow tags on your website. Do you really need to link to that URL (internal or external)? Is that link good or bad for humans? By the way, did I mention that Vizion Interactive provides a complete site structure analysis?

Well, now one year and two months later there are reports that Rushmore Drive is closing, shutting its doors.

According to the AP article, IAC will close Rushmore Drive and the company named Black Web Enterprises will also shut its doors.

Spokeswoman Stacy Simpson said Wednesday that the Barry Diller-led Internet services company will close the site Friday after an unsuccessful effort to sell it. She also said that Johnny Taylor, the site’s chief executive, has resigned.

I have to admit it was a bold move by IAC last year to launch this search engine during the political campaign of Barack Obama. Apparently there were using “patent pending technology” that “increased penetration of sites heavily trafficked by the Black community”. I have yet to find a patent or patent application that talks about this technology, though.

I had performed several searches at Rushmore Drive and was confused over the search results, especially when a web design firm was “ranking well” for a phrase such as search engine optimization. But maybe I wasn’t the only one confused by their search results?

Everyone it seems is hanging out on Twitter and sharing their links and tweeting about not only the latest news and gossip, but they’re also talking about everything from aplusk to #unfollowdiddy.

It seems as though every few minutes there’s another “trending topic” on Twitter. So, how do you keep up with it all? How do you track your brand, your niche topic, your keywords, or even your own company name on Twitter?

There are several different resources available to follow and watch the trends on Twitter. Of course, there’s Twitter Search, but for many popular keyword phrases you just cannot get enough data to make it worthwhile. Some popular phrases, especially if they’re trending topics on Twitter, get mentioned several times a minute, leaving you to think that they’re hot topics right now but what about last week? Or even yesterday? As of this writing, Twitter only shows the top 10 trending topics. A lot more data exists out there, and luckily it’s pretty easy to get ahold of. One of my favorites right now is Twist, which will show you a lot more than the top 10 trending topics, they’ll show you the hot topics of the day and even of the week, which is pretty great stuff if you’re a marketing, webstats, techno-geek like myself.

If you’re really innovative, and you crave all sorts of data about your keywords and your niche, or you want to see which keyword phrase is more popular than another one, you can search for something like this, which is a search for “seo, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing”, to see which is more mentioned more often. What I particular find interesting is the chart below, which shows that “SEO” is incredibly more popular than the other phrases. I would bet it’s because we’re probably getting used to cramming words into smaller spaces, less than 140 characters, to be exact!

So, if you’re looking for keywords that describe your industry then you might try some searches of the Twitter data that’s out there to see what people are talking about on Twitter. Then, as you tweet more about whatever you tweet about, start using those keywords in your tweets to make sure that you’re using the “latest jargon” so to speak, the latest keywords that everyone else is using to talk about your industry. I have to admit that I thought people used the phrase “SEO” in their tweets on Twitter, but I never imagined that it was so much more popular than “search engine optimization” or even “search engine marketing”.

Another Twitter keyword research tool you might try is Twitscoop, a tool that bills itself as a way to “stay on top of Twitter”. I tried to look at the data that Twitscoop provides, and it’s rather limited, going back just 3 days and only allowing you to search for one keyword phrase at a time:

So, yes, the phrase “SEO” has been used a lot, but it’s difficult to compare that data with other keyword phrases, like “search engine optimization” and “search engine marketing”. I’m interested in learning about other keyword research tools that you may have come across, and if I find any new ones worth mentioning and writing about, I’ll certainly let you know right here by writing about it.

When it comes to organic search engine rankings in Google, one of the many factors that they consider is the “link text” or “anchor text” that is pointing to a web page. Anchor text is the “link label or link title is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink.” Google has, for many years now, looked at what other people say about you, or, more specifically, what other web sites say about your web page. So, when you’re trying to “rank well” in the search engines for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, something you can do is to try to get links to your website with certain “anchor text”.

Over the years, we have seen an increase in people trying to buy links with specific anchor text in order to influence the search engine rankings. We’ve also seen a lot of people try Google bombing (also known as googlebombing), where pranksters try to get a certain web page to show up in the search results even though that phrase isn’t mentioned on the web page. Take a look at Google’s googlebombing blog post and you’ll see an example of it. In 2007, Search Engine Land reported that Google effectively “killed miserable failure” by making changes to the Google algorithm. So, since about 2007 or late 2006 (whenever they made the change to their algorithm), it has been important to note that when you are trying to get links to your web page for search engine optimization purposes, you need to “vary the anchor text” that is used. If you want to rank for “search engine optimization”, then you need to use different anchor text links to your website, like this:

Search Engine Optimization blog
Search Engine Optimization website
Search Engine Optimization services
Dallas Search Engine Optimization firm
Search Engine Optimization and PPC company

I know that the examples above don’t link to the same web page, but the anchor text shows the various versions of the anchor text. We know that Google is “looking for” anchor text that’s not natural, anchor text that appears to be “rigged” or “too exact”. Whatever the case, you need different versions of the anchor text. Different phrases. There are several ways to come up with different anchor text:

- Look at your keyword research and see what people are searching for
- Look at your web stats. Are there certain versions of the keyword phrase that you’re ranking for that you haven’t thought of yet? Perhaps you could use one of those.
- Look at your competitors’ websites. Are they using any keywords in their title tags that you aren’t using?
- Look at the Google Wonder Wheel.

The Google Wonder Wheel is a pretty new feature, which is “a graphical way to explore topics by clicking on related searches that go deeper into the subject of the main query.” In other words, it looks like this:

When you perform a search query at Google, you will see a “show options” link on the top left of the search results. Click on the “show options” link and then “wonder wheel” and you will see the Google Wonder Wheel. Above, that’s an example of the Google Wonder Wheel results for “search engine optimization”. What they’re showing here is a list of keyword phrases or anchor text links that you could use if you have a website related to search engine optimization:

search engine optimzation india
search engine optimization conference
search engine optimization cost
search engine optimization for dummies
search engine optimization forum
search engine optimization pricing
search engine optimization submission
meta tags

Certainly these links aren’t exactly what you would be looking for if you were to want exact link text recommendations, but for “search engine optimization” you could use it as a list for possible ideas for blog posts on your website or, if you’re a search engine optimization firm in India then you might use that keyword phrase. For other industries, the Google Wonder Wheel is a good way to find out what others are using as anchor text to their websites. For example, if you look at that Google Wonder Wheel for “search engine optimization company” you get “seo company” (a good alternative) and (seo services) also a great alternative.

So, if you’re looking for better search engine rankings and you’re having trouble with some certain rankings for some keywords or keyword phrases, you might take a look at using the “Google Wonder Wheel” to see what Google says about a keyword phrase. It might just be that the links to your website are too “close a match” and you need some additional variances of the link text pointing to your website.

So, what does the Swine Flu have to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Let me explain a bit more. I have the opportunity to watch the website statistics of a blog post that was made just the other day about the Swine Flu. The blog post is about how you go about determining whether or not you have the Swine Flu. Certainly, it’s a pretty hot topic right now.

But, what’s even more interesting, is the website statistics and the actual search phrases (keyword phrases) that we are using to find this particular website in the search engines. I’ve taken a screen shot directly from the website statistics so you can take a look at what I mean. Click on the thumbnail of the website statistics for more information.

Do you notice something rather peculiar about these search phrases? Or maybe it’s not very peculiar at all? What I’m getting at is this: we are now in an age where our search phrases are a lot longer than before. Since when is the top search phrase to a website nine words long? Well, apparently we have now crossed into a time where I can officially say that we no longer need to target short keyword phrases with our search engine optimization efforts. Let’s take a look at some of the top search phrases that is bringing thousands of visitors to this particular website, the one with the blog post about the Swine Flu:

how do you know if you have swine flu
how do you know if you have the swine flu
how to know if you have the swine flu
how do i know if i have swine flu
how to know if you have swine flu
how to tell if you have the swine flu
how do you know you have the swine flu
how do i know if i have the swine flu
how do you know if you have swine flu?
how to tell if you have swine flu
what to do if you think you have swine flu
how do you know you have swine flu
how do i know if i have swine flu?
how can you tell if you have swine flu
swine flu dizzy
how to know if i have swine flu
what to do if you think you have the swine flu
how do you know if you got the swine flu
how can you tell if you have the swine flu
how do you know if you have the swine flu?
how to know you have swine flu

What’s interesting to me, is that you have to go down to the 15th top keyword phrase in order to get to a three keyword phrase. The top keyword phrase that brings traffic (thousands of visitors), which is 9 words long, brings 6 percent of the traffic to this website.

When you start seeing the top search phrase to a website be 9 words long, you have to start thinking of the long tail keyword phrases, keyword phrases that describe exactly what someone is searching for: those are going to be the “money keywords”, the ones that bring in very targeted visitors to your website.

During the search process, when we start searching at a search engine, we may start our searches with shorter keyword phrases. But, as we continue to search and not find what we’re looking for, we tend to broaden our search phrase, and we our search phrases becomes longer.

In this case (of the swine flu blog post), we’re seeing thousands of visitors using over 1000 different keyword phrases: and the majority of the keyword phrases tend to be longer than 5 words in length. The website is seeing thousands of pageviews every day because of these long keyword phrases. Certainly, the blog post is informational in nature, and does not sell anything (in fact, it links over to the CDC.gov website for more information about the Swine Flu). But, this just goes to show that there really can be “lots of traffic” and lots of “targeted” traffic from people just like you and me who are now commonly using long keyword phrases to find information.

What does this have to do with Search Engine Optimization? Really, it does have a lot to do with Search Engine Optimization. When I started to see this much website traffic come from searches that were 9 keyword phrases in length, I said to myself, “Wow! I’ve never seen that before!”. I been optimizing websites since 1996, and while I have seen a lot of keyword phrases over the years, I have to admit that I have never seen so many people use so many words in a search phrase. Certainly we’re now in a unique time.

So, when looking at your website statistics, from a search engine optimization perspective, I suggest that you start looking further into the phrases that have more words in them. Don’t just look at the two or three keyword phrases. Start digging down further into the keyword phrases that actually may be easier to “rank for” because “the competition” is not targeting those keyword phrases. If you start looking at what people are “saying” in those long keyword phrases, you may be able to see what they really are looking for: and you can create content on your website around those keyword phrases that describe what they’re really looking for. And if you do that, you’re going to find a lot more conversions, a lot more sales.

Also, consider the fact that you can use your blog to answer people’s questions. For example, in this particular blog post, the author used a question as the title tag of the blog post. In fact, using some keyword research before the blog post was written, the author anticipated that people might be asking a question about this topic, the Swine Flu. So, the author of the blog post optimized the blog post so that it could potentially rank well in the search engines for a certain keyword phrase. I suggest doing the same, making sure that you are using your major “theme” of the blog post, the major keyword phrase or keywords, in the the title of the blog post. Certainly, the blog post can also mention those keywords in the blog post’s content (like in the first sentence or in the first paragraph) and elsewhere in the blog post, wherever appropriate.

If you take a closer look, you will notice that there’s a phrase there on the top right of the search results that indicates that the search results you’re looking at are “Customized based on recent search activity”. What? Yes, Google is learning more about us, and they are actually changing the search results based on several different factors: one of them being the fact that they watch what you’re searching for and then display different search results. So, oftentimes I will search for something at home, go to the office, and find totally different search results.

You don’t even have to be logged into a Google Account in order to receive the personalized search results. That means that they are looking at information such as your IP address and your location (my IP address at home shows that I’m about 250 miles where I’m actually located…so Google thinks I’m in a different location).

I have to be honest with you: as someone who likes to actually see where a web site is “ranking” in the search results, I find it annoying at times to always be served up “personalized search results”. If this is the case with you, then I have a great “tool” for you: I’ve created a Firefox Bookmarklet that you can click on that will remove the personalization from the Google search results for you. All you have to do is click on the link and it will remove the personalization.

Here is how it works:

1. Install or “add” the following bookmark. If you’re using Firefox, then all you have to do is click on the following link and hold down on your left mouse button. Drag it to your Firefox Bookmarks toolbar.

Remove Personalization

2. When you’re on the Google search results page, (like this one), and you see a statement on the top right of the search results that says “Customized based on recent search activity”, then click the Firefox bookmarklet. The Google search results will automatically be refreshed, with the same exact keyword phrase you just searched for: but the personalized search results till be removed, you will see the “non-personalized” search results.

In the future, we are going to be seeing Google deliver more personalized search results to us in an effort to improve our overall search experience. But, if you’re annoyed by this like I am, then here’s a way to actually remove the personalized search results.