Although Google does a fine job of locating WordPress content (especially if you alt tag everything and categorize properly) there are other ways to find what’s up on blogs:
Track What Bloggers are Saying – Bill’s Buzz Marketing Blog – ECNext

Blogpulse is an AC Nielsen service with a simple interface and some trending reports.IceRocket searches not only blogs by MySpace as well, another CGM channel that deserves monitoring. IceRocket also offers a trending tool.

Technorati often uncovers blogs not picked up by the other engines, but usually returns the fewest results for searches I conduct.

And of course, there’s the small start up known as a Google. Goog’s Blog Search returns the greatest number of results for the searches I’ve conducted and has that oh so friendly and simple Google UI.

This is by no means a comprehensive list- and there are other sites, like Digg, that help you find out what people are talking about, interested in, or posting about.

Most people don’t start at one of these sites for search, they start at a major search engine like Google, but, times change, and it never hurts to be aware of what’s out there.

Remember, Search Engines don’t all index the same thing- or give the same results, so it never hurts to have many of them available for different searches.

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.