This one has us pretty amazed, when Google did the latest round of page rank adjustments, Google itself slipped to a PR of 9, while Google’s biggest competitor, Facebook went to 10.

Aside from demonstrating that Google is completely unbiased with the page ranking system, it is also the strongest indication yet of the importance of visitor time on the website being an important factor in calculating page rank.

Think about it, the more effective Google is as a search engine, the more quickly people will find what they are looking for and the less time they will spend on Google. Conversely, a social networking website like facebook should hold vsitors for a long time.

So what is the SEO Tip for the average website owner wanting to rank highly in Google? Keep tweaking your website to make it an engaging experience for visitors. Sure it’s important to have people linking to your site and to be indexed in directories and good PR across the web, but if your website is not holding the visitors when they get there, you will probably struggle more and more to maintain a good rank in search engine results. And anyway, the whole purpose of having a website is to attract visitors, engage in some way and get them to take some kind of action before they leave.

Back in 2009, Link Building was responsible for about 42% of a website's SEO rank

This is one thing the experts appear to agree on as Google becomes better and better at catching cheats. A comprehensive survey published on  SEOMoz, concludes that the perceived value of a website to others will be the most important factor in determining the search engine results.

This is good news for all those who maintain credible websites and have struggled to maintain high search engine ranks against the sheer mass  of  crappy Adsense  pollution that ruled that space for so long.  Slowly, one by one we have seen them get slapped into oblivion as Google becomes more and more sophisticated at defining crap and catching these morons.

But it does make you wonder – this patented system of ranking a website by the number of inbound links is what has kept Google the undisputed king of search engines for so long is now almost redundant. Doesn’t that mean Google will lose it’s advantage over the rest of the field?

It will be an interesting couple of years as the peer endorsement through website links all but fades away and is replaced more and more with the perceived value of a website to visitors. I expect to see software applications that mimic the patterns of visitors on a website, increasing the average time people spend on sites or perhaps that is what all the unemployed Indian link builders will be doing in the future.

But the one thing that will always be hard to cheat is good original content. I doubt there will ever be a substitute for it.

For those who love the science of SEO, the SEOmoz report is comprehensive and a good read, though very academic, as you would expect from such an organization.  Read it here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

A famous quote by copywriter  Paul Butterworth, aimed at copywriting critics.  ”What the heck has this got to do with SEO Tips?” you ask. Everything.  Because good effective SEO is increasingly about creating a valuable, useful resource for people online and that is largely copywriting. Original copywriting, not spun articles from other writers.

Google's Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer & Head Of Spam Prevention wants Original content in Google Rankings

Recent Google Algorithm updates were aimed at reducing spammy, copied content – which is exactly what people searching for information on the web don’t want. This change affected approximately 12% of Google searches.

According to Matt Cutts: “we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.”

Matt went on to say: ”We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.”

For search engine optimization it means that original, useful content is becoming more and more valuable, so if you can’t write, go get yourself somebody who can.

And to those who just take other’s content and “spin” it, “Where the heck were you when the page was blank anyway?“

These ancient Chinese texts contain lessons for anybody wanting to create effective search engine optimization

Perhaps the most applicable passage I’ve read in the translations from Sun Tzu’s  texts on the ‘Art of War’ is the following:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

How does that apply to SEO Tips? Well, obviously your enemy is your competitors and you need to know something about their strategy and their capabilities to effectively compete with them and you need to know your own capabilities and weaknesses – hence you can bring in expertise to help you in areas you are weak in.

But in SEO, there is another party that you have to know, the judge and adjudicator, Google. Completely impartial until you make a move, Google can be your friend or your enemy and as an enemy, it can take you out of the battle completely. It always amazes me the number of SEO experts around who do not know the Google Webmaster’s Guidelines.

Do you know specifically what techniques are going to make Google your enemy and get your site penalized? Find out. Seek out an alliance with Google and you will prosper.  Sun Tzu says: “We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors.”

Make it your business to become acquainted with the designs of Google now.

When a client is not making money from their website, the first thing they do is run to you looking for SEO Tips. Quick solutions to drive more traffic to their website, but any astute advisor should always look a bit further than just how many visitors are landing on the page. The real number is what percentage of these visitors are turning into buyers. The conversion rate.

Here are some of the things you might assess:

1. Using Analytics (Presuming you have it installed), look at the average time visitors are spending on your website. I have seen websites that rank in the first five places in Google for highly searched keywords not return a single inquiry simply because the color of the website projected the wrong image. A simple color change increased conversion.
2. Does the website get the message to visitors quickly. Remember you have about 6 seconds to convince a new visitor that your website is worth their time. If it is a flash site, that 6 seconds may be just a load status bar.
3. Is it easy for people to contact you? Remember, there are many distractions online that can take away somebody who is ready to take action – someone may IM them, or an email they have been waiting for may arrive and they are distracted, then never come back to your website. I have seen a simple change on a website increase the conversion rate by 400%. That change was just putting a simple contact form on the top of the right hand column of every page.

Before you invest in a whole lot of SEO work for your site, ask  yourself if you are really making the most of the traffic you’re currently getting. It is much cheaper to convert existing traffic than it is to generate new leads and you’ll cut down on the senseless link and article pollution on the internet. Keep a small, tidy internet footprint and make the most of what you have.

Somebody asked me last week if we could combine WordPress with Business Catalyst – integrate a WordPress blog into the Business Catalyst interface.  Nice Idea, but not possible without a large development team and a couple years up your sleeve.

But what if somebody was doing that? Making a flexible system that was focused on Internet Marketing and SEO, which had a CRM and store etc. tightly integrated. Now that would be a Kick-ass system. Certainly both WordPress and Business Catalyst have their limitations and for a number of reasons, the BC model is proving to be troublesome. Particularly:

1. Having all sites on a central system means updates are applied across the whole system without exception. It’s generally great to have updates, but what if you had used a whole lot of custom code? What if upgrades conflicted with your code and as a result your site came down or didn’t function properly.
2. BC has no staging area, so when sites are effected by updates, you have to try and fix them on a live site. This is particularly stressful when your client is testing it before your QA team can look at it and often one change affects something elsewhere on the site.

There is also the limitation of having a software company develop, vs having an online community develop. The Internet is changing rapidly and what yesterday was considered “out there” is today considered a standard feature – and the pace is rapidly accelerating.

Will the Adobe software  development style of working be quick enough to keep up with change?

Here’s something else to consider when you are wondering what system is best to use:  Security.

With WordPress, there are some serious security holes and particularly if a developer is not aware of them, your site can be quickly hacked or compromised. For instance, the dafault setting on many wordpress files allows Global read/write access, meaning that anybody who knows how to access those files can change them and gain access to your server, passwords etc.

This problem does not relate only to wordpress, it is probably any free CMS software that you host yourself. If you are not aware of security issues and correct settings on this software, you are potentially open to hackers. There are of course also security issues with shared hosting environments depending on how vigilant the hosting provider is in checking for and controlling security breaches.

Business Catalyst on the other hand is a hosted solution, where there is tight control over those settings and breaches are not as likely to occur and if they do, it is Adobe Business Catalyst’s problem, not yours. This is one advantage a hosted solution has over a free, host-it-yourself solution.

If you are considering using Business Catalyst as a development platform, here is a group of good Business Catalyst Designers you may want to contact.

This is something we get a lot of inquiry on, so I’d just like to explore the strengths and weaknesses of both systems.

A word of warning, this is not really a good comparison as they are totally different systems with different focuses – it’s like comparing a thoroughbred horse with a Clydesdale.  But here goes.

WordPress is an extremely efficient blogging engine, that’s what it was designed for. It is very good for search engine ranking, is light and can be modified to make a standard website with a custom theme. An example of this is the office space Cebu website. However, that is about the limit of wordpress’s ability. Attempts at making a shopping cart or a catalog, look like the Hero’s Pizza website in Perth, pretty limited.

Business Catalyst is a fully integrated system that makes a great small business website or store. It has a blog, but that is not even in the same world as WordPress.  You can make a powerful shopping cart, or listing website with Business Catalyst. BC has some great Members area features including Web Apps, which allow you to build little pages that people who are members can setup and maintain independently, like real estate listings. BC has some good SEO strengths, but also some weaknesses. It is certainly not as powerful as WordPress in that regard.

You cannot host BC wherever you want, it is a hosted solution – software as a service. You either buy a license up front or  host on one of their partner’s system. On the other hand, you can install WordPress on any Linux server you want, it’s free.

My advice: Use both. Use WordPress for what it is designed for and Business Catalyst for a more comprehensive solution. Don’t try and make a powerful blog in Business Catalyst and don’t try and make a comprehensive website in WordPress.

I had an interesting discussion a couple of days ago with a gentleman by the name of Lawrence E. Hughes, an evangelist of IPv6 who runs one of the only IPv6 testing centres in the world, right here in Cebu, Philippines. It is Mr. Lawrence’s view that most of the world will switch to this new Internet protocol by the end of the year with or without the US, probably without.

It seems extraordinary that the country that drove the Internet could be dragging it’s heels on something so seemingly important, but there is a good reason for it. We have to switch, because we will probably run out of IPv4 IP addresses by the end of the year – that is except the US which has around 4 IP addresses for every citizen  (They allocated them), while the rest of the world has .2 of an IP for every citizen.

And the US has resisted change in the past to it’s detriment – remember Deming, the statistician who, shunned by Detroit, went on to influence Japanese industry to embark on a program which ultimately resulted in them dominating the motor car industry? And no prizes for guessing which country is at the forefront of IPv6 technology.

Anyway, according to Lawrence E. Hughes, there is a 35 year jump in technology from IPv4 to IPv6. So what does that mean to users, SEO specialists, webmasters? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing is certain – things will radically change and unless you embrace change in a big way, you are doomed to go the way of the Detroit industrialists.

IPv6 will provide secure point-to-point, direct connections between computers, without the many hops that IPv4 makes us take – so that certainly means faster connections with existing lines. It also means accessing people’s computers directly, so it probably means doing SEO on a portion of a hard drive instead of some files on an internet server.  It means masses more information becoming available and perhaps clouds being made up of individual’s computers. And it means to me, that social networking will truly become the dominant internet activity.

What about the portals? and Google? – Certainly there will still be a need for portals and Google is very much out of step with the rest of their complacent countrymen in that they are embracing IPv6.  But the big picture is that Asia is leading the way in this new chapter of internet history and they have certainly thought more about the consequences. The next Gorilla in the room may well  be Asian.

With Adobe’s launch of CS5 and it’s introduction of Business Catalyst to it’s huge database of web developers, people will begin to ask the question: “Is Adobe Business Catalyst good for SEO?” and the answer is “yes and no” – which is basically the way you would answer a question like “do guns kill people?” Business Catalyst is a tool or a platform and it is what you do with it that makes it good or bad for SEO.

Adobe Business Catalyst is a tightly integrated set of web tools, each of which is reasonable on it’s own – you will find a better CMS, or a better CRM on it’s own, but not integrated in the way they are in Business Catalyst. The CMS has all the SEO features we expect these days from a Content Management System, like the auto generated XML Google sitemap, plain English page names and and it does not fill your page with redundant source code.

But whether your site is good or bad for SEO is entirely up to you. It depends on you writing clean CSS, doing your homework, researching keywords and including those keywords in the right places on your website. It’s not really Adobe Business Catalyst that will be good or otherwise for SEO, it is you.