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.

I’ve mentioned Microformats before on this site, but not in direct relation to WordPress. Microformats are ways to code data for universal interchange- something they should have figured out when computers were first invented- but are just getting worked out now. Just as we have formats for pictures: jpg, tiff, bmp, eps etc. Microformats are formats for data that should be shared.

If everyone used these tags properly, search engines would be an order of magnitude more powerful, being able to coordinate the who, what, when, why and where data into a more powerful results page.

The format that comes first to my mind is the Vcard- a way of sharing contact information. There are many other tags- and this article will help guide you to the others and how to incorporate them into WordPress.

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.

GeoPress is another plugin for location data.

Hopefully, when we have more time, we’ll investigate these more and fill you in on how to use these effectively in building a site for business.

Today I was calling make-up artists for a photo shoot. And, of course, I didn’t start with a google search- I called a photographer I knew well and asked her who I should call. She gave me three names, and one of the artists told be about the forth. Good thing I called my friend, because none of the three she told me about had a website.

Each time, I asked, do you have a site that I can look at your work-  each of them gave me an excuse. None of them would would think of working without a phone, but all of them seem to think a site won’t help them. Only one of the three site-less ones had a digital file ready to e-mail, a nice little quicktime movie that showed some of his work. The other two- nothing.

Make-up artists are the ultimate cottage industry. You don’t hire a “Make-up artist company (at least not in the Midwest), they are all self-employed, sole proprietors, in a very visual business. Hence, a website would come in handy. Especially in the Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus Ohio market, where there is a small community of make-up artists- and quite a few photographers.
While the cost of producing a good looking website used to be thousands of dollars, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore thanks to WordPress and the Websitetology seminar. For $79 you get a full day of training, and we then offer a registration, hosting and WordPress installation package for a price of less than the cost of hosting alone from some hosting companies.

The fourth make-up artist had a site. It wasn’t amazing, but it did come up first in Google when I typed her name. It had samples of her work, a list of clients, and contact information. While the other three told me things like “a website won’t get me business, it’s all word of mouth”- the one with the site told me it gets her work all over the country, at much higher rates than what she can charge locally.

These days, it doesn’t matter how small you are, a website is critical for every business. We even did a site for a disabled, retired man who launches white birds at weddings and funerals- and he doesn’t have a computer or internet access, but he’s getting customers from it.

If you are reading this- because you needed a make-up artist in Dayton, Cincinnati or Columbus- I’m sorry. That’s one of the problems with Google searches. But if you give us a call- we’ll tell you who we ended up using.