Someone said on the hackers forum: “The analogy I use is that Categories are like a book’s table of contents, and Tags like its index.”

However, be aware that categories that are actual search terms are very strong Google magnets.

So, instead of using a category “lines we carry” think about “High Performance Motorcycles in Dayton OH”  and then use tags to highlight the brands and product names.

Tags are ways to identify the keywords or concepts in each post- categories group the posts in ways that make sense for others. Lately, Google has started dinging sites for putting a single post in more than three categories (which is too bad)- so think carefully about your choice of categories.

Matt Cutts is the guy at Google who figures out how to deliver better search results- what gets to the first results page. Officially he’s the Head of Web Spam at Google- which makes sense once you realize a big part of his job is making sure that you aren’t trying to “game” Google. All those SEO tricks that may work for a minute- aren’t near as useful as new helpful content on a fairly regular basis. We’re in an “Expert Economy” and those with the newest, best answers to solve searchers problems- will be the people who get to the front page.The days of the static brochure type site are long over.Watch the video- and realize, everything that Matt is talking about is what we teach in the Websitetology seminar. He even praises WordPress, our content manager of choice right at the beginning of the video. And if you need further proof that WordPress is the bomb, it’s the tool he uses for his blog (see link above)

Some tips Matt makes are some of the things we emphasize- like make sure you add descriptions of your audio or video content as text, because Google can’t index audio. (That’s what we’re doing here!) He talks about Googles other tools, like Google base, Google Maps, Google local, as well as tips on video- Google video longer for videos longer than 10 minutes, YouTube for 10 minutes or less (although we’ve got “Directors Status” and have loaded up 30 minute videos to YouTube). He also reminds smart web content creators to use Google ad words to generate alternate key words for your posts.Matt’s best advice to a budding site builder- use a really old browser, or a text only browser to see how a bot sees your site. Flash and Javascript make your site much harder or impossible to crawl. If you do insist on using Flash, use it as decoration, but leave the navigation in HTML.If you are in Dayton OH, and want to learn all the ins and outs of building the best site for Google rank, or, if you want a seminar on how to build an easy to use, effective website that can get you to the front page of Google, you can read up on Matt Cutts or you can take the Websitetology seminar which will give you the insight to get to the top, without having to buy ad words.

Today we got the notification that netenberg had released the Fantastico updates for WordPress 2.3.1 after having 2.2.2 for the longest time. We’ve recently started using Fantastico to set up our initial installs of WordPress, but had done upgrades manually. Today, we tried the auto update feature for the first time- and have this warning: MAKE SURE TO DEACTIVATE ALL PLUGINS BEFORE RUNNING UPDATE. We’re not totally sure this guarantees an un-borked update, but, we’re pretty sure it helped after we reinstalled.

Fantastico is a script that runs from Cpanel on our server to help you automagically install a whole bunch of different Open Source software. It’s really handy, but, be prepared to be at least 30 days behind on most update packages (37 in this case).

Our main reason to switch to 2.3.1 was to familiarize ourselves with the new version of WordPress before the next seminar, but, I’ll give you the immediate highlights:

• ST Visualize Advanced Features plugin  is no longer required- giving everyone access to different levels of CSS tags, the paste from Word function, clean up mess code function, type color, etc.  It’s been a plugin we couldn’t live without- esp. for the glyph finder- so it’s easy to find the ©®™½€ etc.
• The plugin list now tells you if there is a newer version! Long overdue.
• The tag feature helps you organize your posts and categories with yet another tool.

I’m sure we’ll discover other great features as we explore- but, as a warning to all- always disable plugins before updating.