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.

You hear some incredible numbers on long tail keywords from the SEO community, some say they account for over 90% of searches and this does sound feasible. It’s being approached with unbridled enthusiasm and spoken about as the ‘hidden treasure’ in web traffic with people are putting themselves up as experts in long tail keyword searches. A good look over the Analytics accounts of clients however, shows a more complex scenario.

It is also not as simple as a few higher level keywords bringing in X traffic and a long list of five, six or seven word phrases bringing in one or two searches each, it tapers off slowly. It also varies from site to site. If for instance, the company behind the website has good brand recognition in the market place, then quite probably 50% of searches will be variations of the company name or company name and location. For lesser known companies pulling generic keyword traffic, the top five keywords may be bringing only 20% of searches with the tail tapering down much more gradually.

But whatever the mix for your website, the same old SEO rules still hold true for long tail searches as they do for top level keywords. It is important to be credible to Google, to have quality links, a quality domain and good history without any link abuse or cloaking techniques.

Most importantly, content remains King. If you want to see how it works, but a completely unique keyword combination in a page you know will be indexed by Google. Then search that phrase once it has been indexed. You should come up in number 1 position. It’s how teachers check student papers for plagiarization and it’s how a site gets traffic from long tail keywords – that phrase or many of the words in it are in the content somewhere.

As with everything, there is no shortcut to getting traffic from long tail keywords, it is good content writing and careful, ethical SEO work.

There is a game I like to play often, using my imagination – I call it “If I were Google”, and I do this because Google has the money to buy any expertise it needs to buy and Google’s survival at the top still depends on it returning relevant results to your search queries and they are not necessarily the websites that have put the most money into SEO and link building.

SO, Google came to prominence through having this patented system of counting back-links. I like to call it ‘peer endorsement’, it’s based on the premise that if a website is an authority on a subject and therefore worth listing high in the results, there must be other sites, particularly sites related to that subject endorsing it. This system has worked for Google as it is harder to cheat, but then it has spawned this massive industry called link building who’s sole objective is to cheat it.

I would go as far as to say that ‘Link building’ probably accounts for a visible portion of the annual GDP of countries like India.

But then this link building really is different from genuine peer endorsement in that it is in ‘anchor text’ and genuine peer endorsement usually isn’t.

Anchor text linking means that the keywords themselves are linked to the website using HTML and all SEO people use Anchor text.

Have you ever seen a genuine endorsement of a website linked with anchor text? I don’t think I have and I believe that this is because

1. Most people don’t know how to do it and
2. The point of the endorsement is to tell their readers about that website, not to help it rank higher in Google.

So if I were Google, I would place very little relevance on anchor text links and instead determine the relevant keywords for the link from the nearest sub-heading and the text surrounding the link – and I’m talking about genuine http://www.relevantwebsite.com type links.

And then, I’m one man with an imagination. Google can buy a hundred like me and so they probably did everything I’m suggesting a couple years back. Meanwhile, the SEO industry barrels on like a freight train, impressing traffic hungry business with their ’secrets’ and churning out millions of links that probably have very little relevance in Google’s algorithms.

SEO Tips - Using Web 2.0 tools or social networking sites to assist with your website rank

There has been a lot of hype lately about Web 2.0 or social networking tools and like everything else SEO, people search for the magic formula which is going to unleash the power of web 2.0 and finally give them the online success they deserve.

But really, SEO is like other forms of marketing – it’s common sense. It’s about understanding whatever beast it is you’re dealing with, what makes them tick, what their objectives are and then align your activities with those objectives.

For instance, we know that Google wants to give people the most relevant matches they can for their keyword searches – that’s why people come back and that’s why Google is the most valuable piece of online real estate on the planet.

We also know that Google likes Web 2.0 bookmarks, blogs, posts – Why? Go back to what makes Google important – relevance. So they provide relevance.  Why? Perhaps partly  because they have their own policies of policing and eliminating spammers and let’s face it, the biggest threat to Google’s existence is Spammers – People getting their site listed in keywords it is not supposed to be listed in. And that is easier to do with blogs and websites you put up yourself, than it is in a Web 2.0 environment where people are looking out for suspicious activities.

Even without Google, Web 2.0 sites have huge membership numbers and can generate loads of traffic for your website – but to use them effectively, you have to understand them and that takes time. There are no shortcuts, there is no super software – spam is spam and relevance is relevance. You have to be relevant, you have to be real and you have to be somebody that people want to deal with and then you work the numbers, just like marketing anywhere.

I was devastated yesterday when I checked the rankings of one of our websites – it had slid down a couple of places  in Google in about 20 keywords.  I rushed to the search engine to find out which one of our low-life competitors had trumped us, but what I found caught me completely by surprise.

It was we who had trumped us in Google.

How? well we had a whole lot of Web 2.0 posts on the internet that had been there a while and done nothing and we commented on them – I just had all the guys and girls put comments on these posts from our account and wham! Straight to number 1. Unbelievable.

Never, never underestimate the power of Web 2.0, but remember – it is a bit like news or current affairs – it needs to stay fresh and be freshened up – or it ends up in the bin with all the other stale leftovers.

So what is Adobe going to do now with Business Catalyst?

While BC partners focus on the detail such as “are they going to expand the Triangle plugin?”, there is a bigger issue and that is the platform. Many of us were overjoyed that Adobe bought the system and not Microsoft, who are known for making radical changes and using customers as their QA team, but Microsoft is still involved with this – The system is built on .NET, using SQL Databases.

Why did they choose that platform? Try developing a system in Australia using Php/MySql and finding enough good developers – Those guys are a bit thin on the ground there, and anyway, even to us open source evangelists, .NET has proved to be quite stable.

But if you were a company like Adobe and you were looking at something that could become the world’s biggest hosting platform, would you want to be locked in to paying Microsoft Server and SQL licenses for eternity? I imagine there are some serious price discussions happening behind the scenes between the two companies and I bet there are other options on the table.

Linux and open source programming, certainly. I’d use a new, efficient programming language like Ruby on Rails – MySQL? Maybe not – after all, Sun is now the owner and the licensing of that database could always change. Maybe Adobe will snap up another good open source database like PostgreSQL – a relational database resembling Oracle and a good alternative to both MySQL and MS SQL.

Whatever happens, these are exciting days for BC partners and I think the speed with which the system is released to the Adobe community will be a good indication of the platform they have settled on. It would certainly take time to replicate the system in another technology.