We’ve been saying it all along- WordPress is a great Content Management System (CMS)- now mega-companies are starting to figure out that Googlelove is more important than Flash driven sites.

With a lot of CSS wizardry, you can make your WordPress site look like anything you want- Take a look at Ford’s site:

Ford Motor Company – NAIAS Detroit 2007 » At The Show

Apparently, Ford doesn’t quite get it- the site is down as of Monday 15 Jan 2007

One of our new staff members pointed me to Seer Interactive’s site– and I liked what I found. Here is a company focused on getting real results from the web for their clients- much like us.

They dissect Nike.com as an example of how to be too slick for search- I’ve only quoted the first 2 mistakes- but, the whole article is worthy of a read.

If you are wondering how well you do on search- look at your keyword search stats- and see how diverse it is- if everything has your brand name in it- and none of your competition you should be instantly worried!

Overall, big brands typically screw up search in two big ways, and Nike is no different:1. Missing out on long-tail terms: If you are not familiar with the term “Long Tail” as it relates to search, you can get the basic idea from a blog post by the search Granddaddy himself, Danny Sullivan.

Typically, big brands want to target the big unbranded terms like “tennis rackets,” “golf clubs,” or “running shoes.” I do recommend that they target such terms as a way to position their brand in the minds of people who are searching, but they often miss terms like “golf club reviews” or “women’s trail running shoes.” Typically, these long-tail terms are the ones that convert best.

Even worse, in Nike’s case, it doesn’t show up in the top 10 for the term “Nike trail shoes.” That is a term that includes its brand name. This happens a lot with Nike branded search terms. If I were Nike, I would start on the branded terms because they are the easiest to rank well for given its existing Web assets. They are most definitely the low-hanging fruit, just waiting to be plucked. People searching for products using the word Nike in their search are already familiar with the brand and are probably calling out for you to show up—but there’s Nike, hiding from them on page 80!

2. All-Flash sites with no alternative version: Does it make sense to spend significant amounts of money on heavily Flashed branded sites—but not on driving people who know the brand to the branded site using organic (natural) search engine optimization… AKA free clicks?

So maybe you are saying… “Hey Wil, maybe Nike doesn’t want to use search at all in their marketing.” I thought about that. When I did a search on Google for “Air Max,” I got this page:

Nike is paying to be in a top position on PPC, which means that search matters as a way of gaining exposure, brand awareness, and possibly, just maybe, sales. But when I clicked on the PPC link for “Air Max,” I was taken to the Nike store homepage.

see the whole article here: Eight ways Big Brands Screw up Search – A case study: Nike.com

We’ve been railing on Crispin Porter Bogusky build websites for the very same reason- and a quick search on vdub rocks in Google has The Next Wave above them – except for the paid placement above.

There is no reason to pay Google for search results- if you take our Websitetology seminar.

One of the beautiful things about WordPress is that it creates valid code automatically for you (for the most part) and that should help you sleep well at night.

Not that most people understand what valid code is, or care- Google doesn’t (as proven in posts by Matt Cutts from Google). I seem to recall Matt citing something like less than 40% of sites actually validate.

For those of you who wonder- valid code is using perfect grammar and syntax for computers- not for us human beings. It can help with accessibility- which is important to those who count on it- and it helps with Google indexing your site- but, like a book that is written without any hint of the flavor of language- it can create very boring looking sites.

Mike Davidson coded ESPN.com before moving to newsvine.com– and he hates HTML generated typography so much- he invented a way around it- which can break “the standards”- so, he also decided to be a revolutionary- and create a standard breaking icon to put on his site- and explains his reasoning- and takes the heat of all geekdom. It’s a good read for those of you who understand webstandards- and should be enough to scare away the timid:

Mike Davidson: March to Your Own Standard
So what’s up with the little grey button at the bottom of this site? It is my official Invalidation Badge. It’s mere presence on every page of this site renders my entire domain XHTML 1.0 Non-Compliant. Invalid. Erroneous. Whatever you want to call it. Here are the various crimes this one line of code commits:

* An ampersand is not properly encoded
* An alt tag is missing
* An attribute called “myfavoritetag” is made up
* An attribute is missing quotes
* A script tag is missing its type and language attributes
* A non-closing tag is missing its trailing slash
* A tag is upper case… gasp!

By invalidating my entire site with this one line of code, I ensure that I am made aware the instant it matters. The instant this stuff starts to break anything in the real world, I will know. If I only had a few small errors on a few random pages around my site, I could easily miss the day when “the big switchover” happens and wind up with broken pages I don’t know about. And since this code is in the form of a server-side include, I can freely remove it with a few clicks.

It’s kind of like carrying a canary down a mine shaft with you. As long as the canary is alive and chirping, you know you’re okay for air. Actually, I guess it’s not really like that. read the rest of the article….