SEO Sunday: Why do SEOs love Wordpress?

By Keith | July 11th, 2010

For everyone who still thinks Friendster is the premier North American social networking site, allow me to introduce you to Wordpress. Wordpress is a free, open source blogging software that is easy to install, highly configurable, and can be found powering sites just about everywhere on the internet (including this one you’re reading). Although traditionally a blogging suite, Wordpress can easily be used as a backend for a CMS system with a little php development and a “theme”.

So, why do SEOs love Wordpress? While I can’t speak for all the SEOs out there, I give you a couple of reasons:

1. Custom Permalinks

Right out of the box, Wordpress gives a user the option to edit the ugly /?p=23 url structure to a more search friendly structure (/this-feature-is-awesome). No need to edit htaccess files! This can be done automatically via the “Permalinks” menu in the wordpress administration, or right from the post a user is currently editing:

2. Built in Taxonomy

As it was built as blogging software, Wordpress has a built in Category/Tag structure that allows a user to build a full site taxonomy, grouping posts into specific categories and then into tags. As search engines attempt to deconstruct the semantic meaning of a page by its contents, grouping pages into categories/tags is a great indicator to help a search bot understand what you’re talking about. It also allows a user to find related articles based on the current subject, or even a list of all the pages based on a subject. With Wordpress 3.0, you can even set and build custom taxonomies. A custom taxonomy allows for a higher level of grouping tags, such as:

“Tag: Color -> blue, red, green, purple”

This is a semantic step up from the wordpress 2.9 and lower “Tag: blue, red, green, purple” tagging structure.

3. Plugins, plugins, plugins

Did I mention that Wordpress has a lot of plugins? A good number of these plugins are built specifically for SEO! From auto-generating title tags based on the post title to automatic Google Analytics and Adsense installations, Wordpress has a large community of developers who build specifically for making SEO just a little less tedious.

These are just three of the many reasons why Wordpress is continually recommended by SEOs as part of a blog strategy, and often, as a CMS system.

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