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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?

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  • You did examine the xhtml it produces, yes? – Tim Post Jul 22 '10 at 1:43
  • tbh I would say stay away from CMS alltogether for SEO. – sphvn Jul 22 '10 at 2:02
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    Vote to close "not a real question" – delete Jul 22 '10 at 4:17
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    @Tim No, i've not examined the xhtml. I don't use PHP anymore really. @kinopiko How is this not a real question? – chiggsy Jul 22 '10 at 5:49
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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

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  • Fair enough. I don't think so myself, but it's mentioned every time I read anything about SEO, hence my question. – chiggsy Jul 22 '10 at 5:54
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    @chiggsy: I think that it simply due to WordPress being popular, and bloggers et al want to cover all bases. For example you might say "Use keywords in the title tag" which is easy if you're not using a CMS, followed by "and here's how to do it in WordPress" because it may not be as straightforward. – DisgruntledGoat Jul 22 '10 at 10:23
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    FYI, especially with the release of 3.0, WordPress is arguably a full-fledged CMS, and far from just a blog engine. – Travis Northcutt Aug 4 '10 at 4:06
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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.

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  • Now that makes sense as well. It's common, and popular, so people use it. I had thought there might be something special about it, and could not see what that might be. Thanks. – chiggsy Jul 22 '10 at 5:57
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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.

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