WordPress and SEO – What Is the Big Deal?

If you’ve paid attention to the media buzz around WordPress you have no doubt heard people singing the praises of WordPress’ SEO functionality. But what is it about building a website in WordPress that makes it so much better for SEO and those search engine crawls? Here are some of the top reasons that make the list.

• Clean Codes. Without getting too techy here, let’s establish that clean = good. When the scripting of the site is clear and orderly it allows the search engines to crawl the site more easily. In addition, a clean coded site will load faster. With the emphasis that search engines like Google put on website load time, this equates into higher rankings for your site.

• Easily Optimize Category and Tags. Because WordPress has a default setting to put your page posts directly into categories, you are able to do a cleaner job of getting your keywords into your category listing. Also in WordPress you can tag each of your posts which enable the search bots to find internal pages and posts more efficiently.

• Plug-ins, Plug-ins, and More Plug-ins. WordPress is written in an open-source code which means that it is easily accessible to all those crafty developers out there who love to spend their time making new, cool, useful plug-ins. And as the business owner, you benefit. Just do a quick search on Google and you will find more WordPress plug-ins than you could imagine. Some are better than others, though, so be sure to do some research before you choose them.

•  Customizable URLs/Permalinks. This allows you to work keywords directly into your URL by including them into your blog title. For example, rather than a post being at yourblog.com/RT45.html, it would show up at yourblog.com/title-with-searchable-keywords.html. These customizable URLs make a big impact in the search bots understanding your blog page and how to assign and rank it.

• Image Optimization. It’s long been a useful trick to embed a description or keyword into the coding of your image so that the search bots not only recognize what it is, but also integrate that in categorizing your page. WordPress takes this technique a step further by prompting you with several ways to add keywords to optimize your images.

Those are just some of the ways that WordPress stands above the rest in being SEO friendly. There are plenty more. But the real question here is why would you NOT choose a web platform that gives your website an advantage in SEO? So I would encourage you to dig into the WordPress world and experience the edge that some many other business owners already have. And if you have any questions along the way, give us a call here at Eclipse Consulting. We love the world of WordPress and hope you will too.