Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Webspam Team, and for a long time has been the lead evangelist/spokesperson for Google and their products via his blog.   I tuned in today to see if I could glean anything new and stumbled on a recent repost of the state of the index speech from Pubcon 2009.

Some great tips about using the Google Wonder Wheel for keyword research, cool developer tools and  (most importantly in my mind) verbal confirmation that Meta Keywords aren’t used by Google for anything (yay!).  I admit that it’s been so long since I’ve seen a picture of Matt I didn’t know he shaved his head. I’m thinking that he’s starting to look like Jeremy Schoemaker.  Check out the computer generated rendering above.

I won’t rehash the whole thing as Matt has done a great job of articulating the finer points.  It’s worth a watch, because if I learned something – it’s almost certain that you will too.

As the marketing arm of the Extreme Website Makeover project, it’s my responsibility to arrange and organize the marketing and SEO for Robbin’s Wreaths.

Since I started looking at Magento last year, I’ve been extremely impressed with it as an eCommerce solution; I really thought it would be a great tool for Robbin’s Wreaths.  The eCommerce framework is sound and there seemed to be a lot of extensions and add ons for it.

I say ’seemed’ because I didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at it; probably an hour all told.  Knowing the the design for Robbin’s is on it’s way, I decided to have a look at the SEO options for Magento.  Thankfully, the kind folks at Hosting Nation allowed me to use their Magento demo to experiment with the options available.

I have to give a tip of the hat to Yoast, who did this amazing article on SEO for Magento.  If you’re a novice, the steps might be a little daunting.  I’m a salty old SEO dog though.  I’ve done SEO for Joomla and Virtuemart.  I’ve done SEO for WordPress and other custom PHP sites, even coordinated on a strategy for a giant .asp eCommerce site.

This is the first time I’ve ever done SEO for Magento, or used the system at all. I’m going into it virtually blind, counting only on Yoast’s tutorial to guide my way.

Step one: Configuration

This part is simple.  Once logged into the admin area of Magento, I follow Yoast’s steps to set global configuration and SEO settings.  Next, he recommends canonicalizing your domain – basically redirecting the WWW to non-WWW version (or vise versa).  No problem there, I can just refer to my URL Canonicalization Script and copy the rules over to a new file.   I continue with the tutorial and complete the configuration by installing the two extensions Yoast provides for meta management.  The whole process has been a breeze up to this point, much less complex than installations I’ve done with other content management systems.

Step two: Optimization

Easy.  Navigate through the upper menu to the page, category or product you want to add keywords for.  Open the meta information screen for the project and add the keywords you want.  Save, and your titles are added.

Now, there are a lot more steps to optimizing your site laid out in Yoast’s post and I haven’t finished about 90% of them.  I did accomplish what I set out to do, check my options for Magento SEO and make sure I had it down before tackling Robbin’s Wreaths.  No problem, within 20 minutes I had my first title entered into the system.  The most amazing part is that I’ve never used the system before. Now that I’ve started, I’m really looking forward to more.  Thanks to Yoast, and Magento, this is going to be a pleasure.

It’s surprising to me how many websites are still being built without a thought to future online marketing efforts. What I find especially surprising are the number of web development frameworks and tools that were built without a single thought of search engine optimization.

When I develop a website these days, whether it’s for personal or professional use, one of the first questions I ask is “Is this site going to be difficult to optimize? What are the barriers to achieving my goals?”

I’ve compiled a list of content management systems and frameworks that I’ve worked with, ranging from the simplest to the most difficult to optimize. If something is impossible, or nearly impossible to optimize – even if the price is right, I usually won’t consider it for a project unless nothing else will achieve the laid out directives.

Ranking of content management systems by ease of optimization.

9. Homestead

Homestead is a complete solution for website owners.  The monthly fee includes items like web hosting and a small website.  The pros are a short list.  Manage everything in one place, easy to learn and use.  The cons, well, for one – there’s no source control.  You can’t have access to the code, even if you want to.  Custom titles are a no go.  Custom design is equally no go.  You usually have a fixed number of content items (5 pages for $x) and very little power to alter the existing structure.  Plus, you can’t move to another host without losing everything.  There are others like it, such as Vistaprint.  In general, these sites are not much bang for your buck and are often more expensive than a ‘free’ CMS like WordPress or Joomla.

8. Flash built sites

Forget it.  Having a flash site is choosing the opposite of easy search engine optimization.  The rasterized text can’t be read.  The pages aren’t pages.  You may as well have a blank page up there, unless SEO isn’t a consideration.

7. Anything in .asp or a windows environment

Many corporate, big box type sites are developed using .asp.  Don’t go anywhere near this unless you’re an .asp programmer.  SEO for these types of sites is a nightmare at the best of times.

6. Joomla

While I’m fairly proficient with Joomla SEO, it’s taken me a long time to get there.  Joomla has struggled with providing users the configuration necessary to optimize a site properly.  There are third party plugins available, but they’re a bit daunting to say the least.  Things can go horribly awry if you don’t know what you’re doing, I’ve even been approached by other SEO agencies who aren’t comfortable working with the extensions.

5. Any e-commerce system.

E-commerce systems, like Magento, Virtuemart, OScommerce, Volution and others have strange rules.  You often need to download an extension to optimize them well, and even then they’re not self explanatory.

4. Sites using Dreamweaver templates

Dreamweaver allows you to use a template to set global styles for s website.  The problem is that once your template is set, you’re often locked into it and cutting out parts of the code to make it easier to optimize is a challenge.

3. Custom built PHP sites

Sites built in PHP can be as easy to optimize ans anything, if the developer thought about SEO when they built it.  The problem is that they usually don’t, so the elements required to do proper SEO are not available.  If you know PHP, or know someone who does, you can easily make the necessary changes.  You are required to have a working knowledge of the elements you would find in the <head> section of your web page to make this happen.  This is generally my preferred way of doing things.

2. Custom built HTML sites

If a site uses only HTML, it’s easy to optimize.  The hardest part of doing this is gaining the working knowledge of HTML and FTP programs, so you can effectively download and manipulate your website.

1. WordPress, blogging platforms

WordPress is by far the easiest SEO I have ever done.  WP sites get indexed quickly, the extensions for enabling optimization are free and easy to use, and optimization itself is all done via a simple extension to your blog’s posting interface.  When I launch a new site, I always start with WordPress to build traction and develop another site in the background.

Sometimes you need a specific solution to achieve your goals, so you have to find the right balance.  If you don’t speak HTML, or if a blog doesn’t have the features you need, you may have to use a CMS like Joomla.  If you need to sell product, then your shopping cart is more important than initial ease of SEO.  But you should always ask the question of your developer or agency, or yourself if you build it on your own.  There are few things more painful than building a site with lofty goals of search engine success to only discover later that you’ll be ice skating uphill to get there.

Google recently rolled out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions… read the complete article here

It’s true, folks.  I did a search using their suggested phrases.  “spice market review shrimp starter dessert” yields results, one of which had a 312 character snippet.  It should also be noted that Google pulls the snippet from the <meta name=”description”> tag.  If you don’t have one of those, it will use the first snippet of content it finds on your page.

Google also says:

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Sounds like they’re trying to push forward on semantic understanding.  And here I thought they’d given up.

Time will tell if either of these additions turn out to be particularly valuable.  It will mean a change in the way a site is optimized, as individuals try to increase relevance across a broader contextual understanding.  For relevance, I still like Wolfram’s odds of providing the best answers to my questions and queries.