If you own a wordpress blog and have gone in the administration panel this morning, you would have noticed this upgrade notice on top of the screen. Indeed WordPress 3.0 has just been released and we will discover together the new features of the most popular blogging platform.

So I have just clicked the upgrade button and here I am in front of the new wordpress 3.0. The first thing I notice is that they changed the colors from a dark grey to a light grey in the header.

On the left side, the menu has not changed. We have first the Posts, Media, Links, Pages and Comments sections in the same order of WordPress 2.9. However in the dashboard section you can see that there is a new line called “Updates”. Here you can see if your wordpress installation is up to date as well as your plugins and themes. It’s not really useful as wordpress used to notice us when a new release was available or a plugin was misconfigured (remember the akismet message “you need to enter you wordpress API  in order to function“?)

Then we have the Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools  and Settings sections at the bottom.

So visually wordpress 3.0 looks like wordpress 2.9. We have to go into the details and the features to see what’s new with wordpress 3.0.

The evolution can be seen with the default theme used by wordpress. We were used to the blue Kubrick theme, now twenty ten (2010) came out as the new default theme for wordress 3.0. It supports all the new features like backgrounds, headers and menus customization.

If we read the official wordpress 3.0 page, http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0 , we have a list of all features.

One of the most interesting function that we have heard of before is the merger between WordPress and WordPress MU. It means that we can now manage many blogs from just one wordpress installation by creating a new directory or a folder for each blog. So for instance if you own a domain and wants to create a blog dedicated to sports, you can create a new wordpress blog on http://sports.domain.com or http://domain.com/sports. All of this can be managed from wordpress with a single modification of you htaccess file.

The management of categories and menus has been improved. You can now easily customize the menu in your themes. WordPress can now be used as a regular CMS instead of a blogging platform only. Indeed you can now add categories, articles, tags or pages in the menu sections.

Twitter is very popular and wordpress has integrated this fact by adding a shortlinks feature. It will create a short url using a url shortener service.

One of the problems that have not been fixed yet is the lack of space to write the actual content. The main window is still pretty small and won’t allow you to see the full text that are writing nor will show the pictures in high resolutions. The solution to this problem is to click on the full screen button, it will then switch the writing are in full screen, taking all the available space in your browser.

Finally you can watch this really good video tour to discover the new wordpress!

If you are not new the search engine optimisation world, you should already know that google is changing things up with the implementation of a new algorithm. The codename of the new algorithm is “Caffeine”. This new version of the most popular search engine should offer better speed and relevancy according to Google. The reality is that a change in the algorithm is likely to change the position of your website in the serp. A lot of webmasters report better or worse rankings lately.

Let’s see how Caffeine will change the way your site rank in the search results.

• One of the major changes in google metric is the loading speed of your website. Google acknowledges that they will measure the speed of your website as a metric in their ranking algorithm. It is quite normal as the loading time plays a big part of website accessibility.  Google has created a tool to help webmasters to improve their website speed. You can find the tool at that url: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
• The second most important change that is occurring with Caffeine is the freshness of the content. Google emphasizes the importance of the novelty of the content. It’s a great news for blogs as that kind of websites are often updated. You can also see a new integration of Twitter in the search results for the most recent news. It shows that Google really focus on the freshness of the content.
• The last important change is the place that will take social network in the serp. You will likely find more and more results linking to youtube, facebook or twitter.  If you own a company you should consider the social networks as a way to communicate with your clients. You should also post news and articles to that kind of networks. The minimum things to do right now would be to have a page for your company on facebook like the registrar name.com that gives away promo codes on its facebook page and a youtube page with videos of your services or products. We will write more about taking advantage of the social networks in the future. Stay in touch!

Because SEO experts use a lot of obscure words, we will describe the common words used by seo consultants in this article. The article will be often updated in the future.

Adwords: Adwords is part of Google company. This is the advertising division of Google that manages the sponsored listings that you can find on the top and right side of the search results. Adwords works on a Pay Per Click system. Using Adwords is the fastest way to get on top of the search results but it is costly and the listing lasts only as long as you pay for it.

Anchor text: The anchor text is the underlined text that you see on a link to an other page. For instance, the anchor text on the top navigational menu for the testimonials page is “testimonials”.  The anchor text is very important as the search engine robots will associate the anchor text of a link to a web page.

Back links: A back link is an inbound link from an other website.

Beacon: A beacon is a piece of code that is inserted in a web page. It is used to monitor the user’s actions on a web page in order to analyse his behaviour. It is often used in email marketing as the beacon allows the sender to know if the recipient opened and read the emails.  In certain cases, it will also track they way the mouse move around the page to better understand the user’s usage of a website.

Black hat: A black hat SEO is someone who uses short term/high return tactics to get good rankings or drive traffic to his website. Black hat is the dark side of SEO and often involved spam, exploits and other unethical ways to get an edge. Black hat SEO is dangerous as it is heavily fought by the search engines and it will eventually get the website banned.

CTR or Click Through Rate: The Click Through Rate is a ratio that indicates the efficiency of an ad.  For instance, if an ad is displayed 1000 times and get clicked 100 times, the CTR is 1000/100= 10%. A high CTR means that the ad is well optimised and catches the user’s attention.

CPC or Cost Per Click: The cost per click is a term often used in Pay Per Click campaigns (see Adwords). For an advertiser, this is the amount of money he has to pay for each click on his ad. The more competitive is the market, the more expensive is the CPC. For instance the average CPC for the keyword “insurance” in Google Adwords is 16$ if you want your ad to be displayed on top of the search results. Adwords will charge you on average 16$ for every visitor clicking on your ad. On the other hand, top placement for the keyword “dog training” will only cost you 3.50$. The explanation behind this fact is that the dog training market is less competitive (niche market) than the insurance market and probably less lucrative.

Cloaking: Cloaking is a black hat technique used to fool the search engine. Basically the server that hosts the cloaked web page will serve different content depending on the visitor. When the server detects that the visitor is a search engine spider, it will serve a optimised content that will help the web page to rank high in the search engine results. But when the server detects the visitor to be a casual user, it will serve a complete different page like a sales pages for instance. It creates irrelevant results in the search engine results and therefore will get the web page (sometimes the entire website) banned from the search engine.

Conversion rate: The conversion rate refers to the % of visitors who complete an action. It can be used for forms, membership registrations or sales. For instance if a website gets 10 membership registrations every 1000 unique visitors, the membership conversion rate is 10/1000= 0.1% . A low conversion rate indicates that the web page is not relevant for the visitor or that the offer lacks of attractiveness.

Cookie: A cookie is a file stored in a visitor’s computer while browsing a website. This file contains information that the website can refer to at a latter stage (shopping cart content, referrer, user is, etc…).

Crawler: A crawler is a program used by the search engine to discover new pages, analyse the web pages and finally index them if finds them relevant. The crawler is an automatic program that uses an algorithm to determine which pages should be indexed and for what keywords they should rank for. A crawler is also known as a web spider, bot or robot.

Directory: A web directory is a human edited website that lists different websites and sort them by categories. A directory gives visibility to your website on the Internet. In order to get a website listed in a directory, the owner of the directory may ask a compensation in money or back links to the directory.

Doorway page: A doorway page is a web page filled with keywords optimised content. The content in itself is not always relevant but gives the impression to the crawler that the web page should rank for that keyword. In fact the doorway page is just a gateway to the main website and a way to inflate the indexed pages of a website.

Flash: Flash is a technology developed by Macrodmedia and used on website for multimedia purposes. For instance the dynamic banner that you can see on the top of the IntensiveSEO website is designed in Flash. Flash is great for design but the search engine crawlers can’t read Flash objects. Therefore Flash does not have any positive impacts on the SEO of a website and should be used sparingly. Moreover Flash objects are often big files and can increase the loading time of a website.

On page SEO:

Off page SEO: