Found the following article while doing some research for a client brief. It’s one of the best explanations of why a WordPress site (or other web 2.0 style site) is the natural evolution for a business website.

I only picked a paragraph to quote, I highly recommend you head over and read the whole thing:

O’Reilly Network — Building Online Communities

Exist For a ReasonYou must know why your site exists. Otherwise, you cannot judge the effectiveness of any policy. Worse yet, how will visitors know if they want to join the community? What benefit does a user derive from participating? Why should anyone care? Without an underlying goal, it’s extremely difficult to guide users in constructive ways. It would be like starting a company and forgetting that, at some point, you need paying customers.

Why are you online? What problem are you trying to solve? Remember, 80% of Internet use begins with a search- what are they looking for, and how are you providing it?

If you have no clue what MicroFormats are, don’t feel bad- most people don’t.

A good place to get started is at the site http://microformats.org but if you just want a simple explanation: it’s a way of tagging (identifying) something with a standardized label that makes it easy for search engines to find the correct data- and for you to be able to exchange it in a standardized way.

A perfect example is the vCard standard- which stores your contact data in an easy to exchange format.

The importance of being able to tell what data is, is almost as important as the actual data.

Using Microformats in WordPress | blogHelper

The second approach involves the use of specialised WP plugins to create microformat-ted content right from your admin panel. This seems to be the cleaner and more streamlined method.* The exact steps to take will differ depending on the microformat type and plugin you use. Therefore, I’ll just list the plugins available for WordPress, and a link to relevant documentation (if available):
1. Multiple format plugins:
o Structured Blogging – Supports hReview, hCalendar, hCard, and various other elemental microformats (i.e. XFN, relLicense, relTag, and XOXO).
o WP-Microformats – Supports hCalendar and hCard. Adds buttons for each microformat to your Write Post panel, each of which toggles the relevant popup form.
2. hReview plugins:
o hReview WordPress Plugin – Adds the appropriate form fields (which you can toggle on/off) in your Write Post/Page panel.
o WP-Movie Ratings – Movie reviews published via this plugin are in the hReview microformat.
3. hResume plugin:
o hResume Plugin – Creates a new page for your resume, marked up in the hResume microformat.
4. hCalendar plugin:
o uPress WordPress Plugin – Adds the appropriate form fields to your Write Post panel. Screencast guide for WP 2.0 available.
5. hCard plugin:
o WP Microformatted Blogroll – Creates a new page for your links, marked up in the hCard, XOXO and XFN microformats.
6. MicroID plugin:
o MicroID Plugin for WP – Automatically attaches a MicroID to your blog, each post, as well as each comment. More information on this microformat is available.
7. XFN-related plugin:
o Happy Pals – This isn’t exactly a plugin for the XFN microformat itself, but it does automatically apply CSS classes to any rel attached links (e.g. rel=”friend”), so you can apply custom styles denoting the various relationships in your links.
* Besides plugins, there are custom WP themes with support for the hAtom microformat. A few examples are as follows:
1. Sandbox Theme
2. Strangelove (Modified Kubrick) Theme

You may also be interested in more information regarding hAtom support for WordPress themes.

Another tool for microformating is geotagging- where posts are linked to geographic coordinates. We used the geopress plugin for a real estate site in Dayton.

We’ve been singing the praises of WordPress as a Content Management System for over a year to anyone who will listen.

Here is a link to a success story that mirrors what we have found:

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?p=334175#334175

Good content, right CMS, build links, build categories and up to the top of Google you go.

Here is an excerpt:

On day seven the traffic continued, and I noticed that there was more crawling activity from the bots, more activity from visitors (about the same number of visitors, thousands of uniques with them spending lots of time on the site). I added an email newsletter to the site that day and started to receive signups within about 5 minutes. I checked the site in Google (all page indexed), Yahoo! (still not even home page indexed), and MSN (home page indexed). Google’s organic search was sending traffic to the site, the site was ranking in the top 5 for competitive phrases in the industry, and what’s weird to me: people were actually searching at Google for my site’s unique name, a name I had made up about one week prior. That proved to me that the site, the domain, and the content was appearing to be “branded” in that industry.

For $139 you will learn all the tips and tricks of making WordPress get you to the top of Google in our Websitetology seminar. With our very affordable hosting package and starter set-up deal, you can be up and running within 24 hours of the seminar- for under $388.