This is the beginning of my 10 part series on “WordPress SEO Tips – How To & Strategies.”
WordPress is, without question, the most powerful tool for achieving high levels of exposure, and top search rankings in Google’s search results (the ultimate goal and purpose of SEO).
Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, has even stated that WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the technical SEO elements automatically!
That’s a strong statement coming from Matt Cutts, and if he is willing to put his name, and Google’s, on the line with a statement like that, then I’m willing to believe that WordPress is a powerful SEO tool.
More than just hearing people say that WordPress is a powerful tool, I’ve actually experienced it with many of my own, and my client’s, WordPress blogs.
I’ve seen WordPress blogs get crawled, indexed, and up to a PageRank of 3 within 4 weeks, and I’ve seen new postings from WordPress blogs achieve #1 rankings in Google within hours!
Hey, why use a blog for SEO anyway?
That’s a great question! Let me give you 2 reasons why a blog, be it WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, or whatever, is your quickest path to top search engine rankings.
1) Blogs build page inventory in Google. Each blog posting is actually a new page that is crawled and indexed in Google search results. So, the cumulative effect of writing a lot of content is that you are continually building an inventory of pages that are accessible in Google for a wide range of keyword phrases.
2) Google loves freshly updated content. Google’s algorithm is changing from the days of old! It used to be where you could just build a static HTML site, stuff keywords throughout the title, description, and keyword tags in the code, and you’d be able to rank for those phrases.
Well, things have changed!
Google has gotten a lot smarter about how people attribute authority to web pages, and about how black hat SEO’s try to game the algorithms.
So Google has turned to favor sites that feed a continual flow of freshly updated content – something that is impossible to achieve with a static HTML website (non-blog site).
If people are finding your content, bookmarking your site, subscribing to your RSS feed, and coming back for more, then that means people will also be linking to your content. The more traffic, subscribers, and links you have, the more PageRank will be attributed to your site. The more PageRank your site has, the higher it will rank in Google, the more often your site will be crawled, an the deeper those crawls will be – all of which adds more PageRank to your blog.
To satisfy Google’s insatiable hunger for fresh content, you have to feed Google with freshly updated blog posts. In return for your giving, Google will give back with PageRank and authority. It’s actually a great relationship!
Why WordPress?
As I mentioned earlier, just having Matt Cutts promote WordPress as the best SEO tool is enough for me! Beyond that, WordPress is a super clean CMS (content management system), that Google finds easy to crawl and whose coding is well structured.
Also, some other reasons why WordPress is such a powerful SEO tool, and I’ll be covering these in more detail in later parts, is that:
1) WordPress allows super efficient keyword optimization of posts
2) SEO plugins help you optimize your overall blog
3) You can control / custom URL structures
4) Permalinks ensure keywords are present in URL
5) Customization of tags and categories
6) Eliminate / control duplicate content issues
These are just a few of the many SEO advantages that WordPress delivers.
Make sure you stay tuned here at Social Media SEO as we dig down into the “How To” and “Strategies” of leveraging WordPress for SEO!
Finally, here’s a video of Matt Cutts talking about WordPress! It’s a great primer for the remaining posts in my series “SEO for WordPress – How To & Strategies”