Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for pro webmasters. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Wordpress is the de facto seo weapon of choice. I get that.
What exactly is it about wordpress that is so special? It's blogging software, with some plugins, right?
Why can I not use any old blogging engine, or even, a static file generator solution, like old school movable type?
Is there a reason? Or just ease of use?
I have never heard this particular tidbit about Wordpress. Sure, it's aggressively SEOptimized, but I don't think there's anything "magic" about it - in other words, there's no reason any other CMS couldn't be optimized the same way.
I suspect that what makes the difference with Wordpress is the fact that there is a large and active developer community behind it, which includes a lot of people who run WP sites and are quite concerned about SEO. Most other CMS's and other website creation apps don't have the same resources to draw on.
I think saying Wordpress is the defacto SEO weapon of choice is incorrect because SEO deals with all web pages, Wordpress only deals with blogs and a few other site type.
SEO is about optimizing your site for search engines. Wordpress is an application for making a blog.
Sure Wordpress is very search engine optimized but so are thousands of other sites that have nothing to do with blogs and don't use Wordpress.
So my point is Wordpress is great at SEO but that doesn't mean anything else can't be or isn't
You can do what WordPress does. A big part of understanding that is using WordPress and seeing how it works. I get great SEO using Django and PyroCMS as CMSes - because I studied what made WordPress so good and worked that into the web frameworks I use (Django, CodeIgniter and Spring MVC).
The truth is that the CMS itself just holds your content. Of course you need the right fields and a solid architecture to keep everything efficient, but the real heavy lifting in terms of SEO is done in the way you code your front end - same as WordPress. WordPress does a great job with keyword rich URLs, title tags, h1 tags and internal links, but you can build that into any front end system you choose.
One thing that makes WordPress powerful for SEO is something that a lot of "corporate" sites lack - lots of text. A blog, by nature, is text heavy - and search engines love text. Sometimes people ask me why their site is low on search engine rankings and I see a top page with a slider, a menu and a bunch of image links to internal pages. Maybe they have a single h1 tag. This may make a good looking top page, but there often isn't enough keyword-rich text to really show what the site is about.
Content is still king.
