plusLINK Blog

WordPress Can Help Me With SEO?

Posted on 17. Jul, 2009 by admin in SEO

One word changed my life for­ever one day back in late 2007. I was a blog­ger then, frus­trated with a blog­ging plat­form that couldn’t sat­isfy my needs. Why didn’t I have sim­ple root access to my blog, enabling me to change what­ever I felt like? It was my blog, with my name embla­zoned on the front page, yet I couldn’t com­mand it to per­form tasks not already pre-formed in its lit­tle e-head.

Ok, enough with the sappy story. For real now. Two years ago I took friend’s advice and moved my first blog from Blog­ger to self-hosted Word­Press. I have never looked back. Today I would like to make the case to you that a Word­Press blog is what you need to give your web pres­ence the lift it needs. Let’s not talk about the host­ing and the domain name pur­chase, and the code, and all that stuff. That is for another day. Let’s talk about a few fea­tures Word­Press pro­vides that will make it easy for you main­tain an SEO-friendly blog.

First, Word­Press makes chang­ing your URL struc­ture effort­less. Why should you care about your URL struc­ture? Well, would you rather be telling Google that your site is at “http://www.mysite.com/?p=123″ or at “http://www.mysite.com/my-first-post/”? That is cor­rect. You want to put your site’s best face on for Google, and Word­Press makes it as easy as typ­ing a few let­ters into a blank field. Brilliant.

Next, Word­Press uses “plu­g­ins” to make a whole host of SEO tasks as sim­ple as can be. One of these plu­g­ins auto­mat­i­cally cre­ates an XML sitemap for your blog, effec­tively giv­ing Google a map to your site. This makes for a much faster index­ing in the search engines, since it is never a bad idea to throw a bone (or a fly) to search engine spi­ders. Another plu­gin puts a lit­tle bit of text at the bot­tom of blog posts that con­tains a list of related posts. I like that one because it links to other sim­i­lar posts I wrote in the past but maybe just for­got about.

By far my favorite plu­gin for SEO is All in One SEO Pack. This plu­gin takes some of the most impor­tant site opti­miza­tion tasks that lots of folks just might not know how to do, and makes them ridicu­lously easy. These peo­ple might have heard that they need a good key­word rich title tag, good H tags, meta descrip­tion, meta key­words, and so on. But they just don’t know how to change them. All in One SEO has a field for all those things, plus a bunch of other title for­mats and header options. Don’t even think about mess­ing with code when there are plu­g­ins for things like this.

Finally, Word­Press makes updat­ing your main site con­tent almost enjoy­able. You already know that you need fresh con­tent every so often to keep the search engines happy with your site. But writ­ing a post in Word­Press doesn’t require any knowl­edge of tag­ging, cat­e­go­riz­ing, ping­ing to notify oth­ers of your new con­tent, or any­thing of the sort. You don’t even have to know how to write the code for a link. Per­haps that’s com­mon­place these days, but the process is sim­ply seam­less in WordPress.

If you are look­ing for a way to be able to accom­plish some SEO on your own time, and you want a solu­tion that will do pretty much any­thing you want it to, give Word­Press a try. There are so many peo­ple out there design­ing plu­g­ins and attrac­tive themes for Word­Press that it’s impos­si­ble to keep track of them all. All I know is that you will find a solu­tion that is a plea­sure to work with, and it will do a lot of good for your site with the search engines.

Related Posts:

• Is Most Of SEO Just A Boondoggle?
• The Basics of Search Engine Optimization
• Organic SEO Vs. Pay Per Click (PPK)
• Under­stand­ing Search Engine Optimization
• Search Engine Opti­miza­tion Techniques

Tags: are-making, motions, much-faster, never-existed, produce-the-teeniest, program-often, search-engine, SEO, tasks-as-simple, the-first, the-teeniest, these-plugins, xml