Posted by on June 12th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in SEO - Search Engine Optimization |
Blogging has become the lifeblood of most websites today. Whether these blogs are aimed for profit, advertisement, product review or for personal use, they have become so widespread and syndicated that link building strategies have included blogs as one of its most important components.
There are so many blogging websites and software available today that web developers can choose from. Among the hundreds available in the Internet today, WordPress has become the most popular choice among web bloggers today.
What is WordPress?
WordPress—although technically a user-friendly blog generator itself—is very different from others in the Internet. This is mainly because WordPress is reputed to be one of the few blog publishing applications that offer users options to tweak the SEO-related aspects of their sites. The result are sites that rank relatively high in search engine result pages — ones that attract heavy customer traffic.
Advantages of Using WordPress
WordPress also has a lot of features that can be used to further optimize your website and make it appealing to the eyes of search engines and visitors. Best of all, WordPress is easily accessible to anyone who wants to use it for their SEO strategies. Here are other advantages that WordPress has over its competitors in the World Wide Web:
1. Wordpress allows you to set-up your own link
This is done through the use of permalinks or permanent links. A permanent link is a modified link where visitors can use to be directed to your website. WordPress automatically provides its users with URLs upon registration. These can be modified by developers to their liking so as to make it easier to remember and search for their visitors.
It is important to remember that URLs are basically the first ones that visitors will look for when searching a website. URLs in WordPress can be modified according to the subject of the blog, the name of the author or the titles of each particular post in the blog.
Some developers make URLs according to the dates their articles were posted. While this is not entirely bad, this can also make your posts harder to find. Having URLs with as few hyphens as possible is still the best way to go.
2. The Post Slug feature
The Post Slug Feature enables bloggers and developers to personalize the URLs of their post to make it more keyword-rich and searchable for search engines. Authors can also put tags on the important keywords within the blog, making it easier for their visitors to search for that particular blog post.
3. Wordpress gives you the option to optimize your blog posts’ titles
Like the URLs above, WordPress also provides default blog page titles. However, WordPress allows authors and developers to edit these to their own liking, in a way that they think would fully optimize it. Like any other SEO strategy, making your titles direct to the point is always advantageous. WordPress allows its authors to optimize their titles and make it more search engine friendly.
One thing to remember is that not all good-sounding titles will bring you up the search engine rankings. It is important to find the middle ground between an appealing title that will catch the attention of your visitors and a keyword-rich one that will bring up your search engine rankings.
4. Wordpress can be configured by bloggers in order to minimize duplicate content
One of the main problems that can hinder a web site’s ascent into the top of the search engine rankings is the issue of duplicate content. Duplicate content, in its most basic definition, means any content that can also be found on a separate website. This is so even if both pages belong to the same web site. Not modifying or reviewing your WordPress accounts will almost always result in a big duplicate content problem.
Many developers have continuously had the misfortune of their pages not being indexed by search engines because the systems detected content that is also present on other pages. Duplicate content materialize due to the way WordPress operates: it keeps copies in you the monthly and category archives. This results into one entry being posted in three different pages which will be considered by search engines as duplicate content.
There are features in WordPress that prevent this from happening. WordPress can use a short part of the whole article as a teaser in your home page then provide a permanent link where visitors can be directed to read the full article. The use of permalink on your blog entries will ensure that the case of duplicate contents will be avoided.
Also the More feature of WordPress allows bloggers to quick-tag parts of their post to appear in their homepage. There is no need for separate summaries to be made because WordPress will do the separating and avoiding of duplicate contents for you.
5. Wordpress enables its users to prevent Feed Crawling
Feed Crawling happens when search engines index RSS feeds which is not good for a website’s rankings. This RSS feeds will lead visitors to unreadable and non-existent websites instead of your own web page. Users can modify the settings of their WordPress blogs in order to disallow search engine crawlers from indexing parts of the website other than page of the blog post.
Using WordPress presents several advantages that make it easier for a blogger to go up the search engine rankings and reach their target customers. There are several other features and plug-ins that developers can enjoy when they use the WordPress blog for their web sites. These features have kept WordPress the top choice when creating a blog for personal use or even as a part of a bigger web page.
