Matt Cutts from the Web Spam team at Google showcases the good and the bad of WordPress as seen through the eyes of Google, including basics on how Google search works and how you can boost your blog’s results in Google searches.  This offers good information regardless of whether you use wordpress or not!

I still run into a lot of sites that use their website as a brochure rather than a marketing tool. Sometimes companies don’t have the technical expertise to implement a solution to turn it into a sales funnel or they don’t have the time to dedicate to it. I’m often guilty of the latter; I’m usually doing work for others well into the night and by the time I get around to my tasks I’m pretty well spent.

Just about every website owner wants to get more traffic to their site. You might hire a SEO company to “optimize” your site or you might spend money on advertising, whether its pay-per-click (PPC) or other mediums. Like many others, I routinely look at my Google Analytics to see how these things affect my traffic, hoping for that upward trend line that lets me feel like my website is doing something for my business (umm, especially since my business is web design).

Over the last couple weeks I have seen many posts by experts on SEO.  These tips are great, and very appreciated, but for those new to site ownership or optimization a great place to start may be from the search engine companies themselves.  After all who knows the search engines better?  Here's a starter guide from Google:  Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide