This page is now so long that the comments no longer work. (Old theme. I’m working on it! “Cobbler’s son has no shoes.” You know, that kind of thing.) Come on over to the latest WordPress questions page: WordPress Q&A: More Answers to WordPress Questions and post your question in the comments there. I’ll answer ASAP. The cost? Free!

P.S. If you’re into WordPress, follow Mark McLaren on Twitter for free tips and howto’s.
And if you are in Seattle, check out the Seattle WordPress Meetup on Meetup.com.

Our next Social Media Marketing Event will be on May 11, 2010: “Explode the WordPress Learning Curve: An Evening with the Experts”

I’m very excited to be part of this WordPress Seminar in Seattle line-up! You’ll get lots of vital information, distilled, organized and ready to be put to use. My 20-minute segment will focus on the five most important things you can do to optimize your WordPress website or blog for search engines.

Read more and get tickets for this upcoming evening of social media learning and networking: WordPress Social Media Seminar in Seattle (click for more information). Tuesday, May 11, 6 PM to 9 PM at Bellevue College, Bellevue (Seattle) Washington.

The orange boxes indicate paid search results. Google marks these as Sponsored Links. Sponsored Links always appear at the top or on the right side of search results pages. Businesses pay Google to be listed here. These are also called text advertisements, “paid placement” ads or “pay per click” ads.

The green box indicates a natural (also called “organic”) search results listing. Businesses do not pay Google to appear in this spot.

Search for  ”adwords consultant seattle” and you’ll find McBuzz Communications at the top of the natural results. This is free advertising. Listings in the top position on the page get many more clicks than the majority of paid placement results, and they certainly get more clicks than the natural listings that are further down on the page.

Yahoo! and MSN.com search results pages have a similar format — with both paid and natural search listings.

Google Indexes Pages Much More Frequently Than Before
Here’s an interesting sidebar. I created the post you are reading right now at 10:16 AM today, October 23. Looking at the Google search results page just now (at 10:30 PM the same day), I see that this post has already been indexed by Google, meaning that it shows up on page one (in the number 10 spot at the bottom of the page) for the same keyword.

Why is this important? Because it shows just how quickly new content on your website can affect its performance in search results.

The post you are reading right now was indexed by Google and listed on page one of serch results for “seattle marketing communications” the same day it was created! What does this tell us? When you apply basic search engine optimization techniques — including making frequent updates to your site with keyword-rich headlines, bullet points and text — you can see immediate results and bring in more customers.

You may recall the days when you had to wait three to four weeks, sometimes longer, for updates to your website to show up in search engine results pages. If you optimized your site, it might take at least that long to find out if what you did worked or not.

As this example shows, those days are long gone — provided you are doing the right things with your website. And that’s a significant qualification. What are the right things? Exactly what we talk about on mcbuzz.com, like following our Web Marketing Tips — and the fact that you should use content managment or “blogging” software like WordPress to build and maintain your site rather than old-fashioned, “static” format HTML. (The latter includes sites created with do-it-yourself, “site builder” tools you find on GoDaddy.com, Network Solutions and Yahoo! web hosting.)

Let me know what you think!

McBuzz Web Marketing Tips
#1: Use “site:url” to Find Out If Your Website Is Indexed by Google

#2: Use XML Sitemap Generator to Get All Your Website’s Pages Indexed by Google

#3: Submit an XML Sitemap to Google

#4: Use Keywords in Web Page Titles