WHAT ARE THE SEO ADVANTAGES OF WORDPRESS?

WordPress has several advantages as a blogging tool and content management system.  However, one of the greatest advantages is the SEO considerations.  Search engine optimization (SEO) is important so the website has a higher ranking in search results in the primary engines such as Google or Yahoo.  Many webmasters spend a lot of time and even money in order to increase their web ranking but with WordPress there are many built in tools available to make the process more efficient.

New Content

Search engines place a premium on sites that have continual new content.  Using WordPress makes it easy to update the site on a regular basis with new information.  Each time the site is crawled by the search engine, new content is searched and the natural ranking of the site increases with very little effort.

Meta Tag Generation

With WordPress, meta tags are automatically generated which saves time and effort.  Meta tags will help when users are searching for a particular term or phrase.  Added to a naturally high search engine ranking, this can be highly beneficial.  In addition to automatic generation, you also have the ability to add any tags you want.

Title Optimization

WordPress also automatically optimizes titles for SEO.  So, when you create a blog article the titles work in conjunction with the tags and your SEO will increase.  Whether a person is searching for a particular term or phrase, the post itself will show up high on the search results.

Permalinks

You can automatically change settings in WordPress to use permalinks.  Permalinks are a URL that points to a specific post on the blog.  So, instead of going to the main page and searching for a post, you can have a URL of http://yoursite.com/category/post-name.  This makes it easier to find in search engines and the links do not become irrelevant.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites are an important part of increasing SEO.  When you post new material to these sites you garner additional exposure to potential customers and you have the opportunity to increase SEO by having relevant incoming links.  WordPress has a function that allows new posts to automatically post to various social networking sites such as Twitter, FaceBook and MySpace.

THE MAIN REASONS THAT BLOGS DO WELL IN THE SEARCH ENGINES

Blogs are a popular format for reaching people - whether you are simply putting your thoughts down for others to see, reviewing the latest electronic gadgets or trying to bring customers to your web site a blog is a great way to do all of these things.  Because blogs offer such fresh content to the web and are able to do so efficiently, search engines give them more weight than typical web sites when giving results to an end user.

Google, for instance, rates a blog with twice as much weight compared to a typical web page.  There are a lot of other factors but if everything else was equal, the blog would end up higher than the regular web page every time.

Another reason blogs do well is that the end user adds their own tags.  It isn’t necessary to “key word stuff” a blog article because the search engine bases some of the search on the tagging.  This allows for better content.  The use of tags can be abused but most of the search engines have ways of determining this and will lower the page in the ratings or remove it completely if there is enough activity to warrant this type of punishment.

There are a couple free sites that allow end users to let the search engines know about their blog’s and updates to those blogs.  This gives the person posting blog content the opportunity to proactively keep their content updated with the search engines.   Typical web content requires more time and it is never immediate; with a blog, you can go to a site such as pingomatic.com and alert the search engines about your latest blog.

Finally, blogging has become a way to pass on information quickly and efficiently.  There is a blog that focuses on almost any topic that can be imagined.  The search engines know this and scour them so that they are included in the results.  Blogging can be considered a great equalizer for the internet.  A blog from an individual easily can get more traffic than a major news site, for instance.  The unique perspective of that individual is valued by the search engines when someone is searching for information on the topic.