Updated: September 6, 2017
It’s almost amazing to think we’ve never talked about how our blogs are setup. You can find lots of information on SEO-e.com and our search engine optimization knowledge center on the power and importance of blogging.
By setup, I mean the actual infrastructure we use to post things to SEO-e and other blogs we handle.
WordPress is an open-source blogging platform used by many websites to build out their pages. Some simply use a URL through WordPress (yoursite.wordpress.com) but to build search rankings for your business, you need to use your own domain…like ours – (http://www.seo-e.com/).
This ensures your site and business get the search engine benefits of building out your site’s content.
WordPress though is more than just a blogging platform. With a few widgets, themes, plugins and coding, it’s also a very useful
content management system.
According to Wikipedia, a content management system is a “software system which provides website authoring, collaboration and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage the site’s content with relative ease.”
You may have heard of these systems as often being used to manage content on large sites.
The problem with many of them – especially older versions – is that they cause several problems from an SEO perspective…you’ve probably seen some of these before.
Dirty URLs, especially common on large ecommerce sites, is one disadvantage of a content management system. If you see a URL with a ‘?’ in it, all of the characters past the question mark constitute the dirty URL.
Another drawback of content management systems (…especially older ones) is the tendency for content to be placed too deep in a sub-domain, example – http://www.yoursite.com/articles/how-to/use-our-products/model 2613.
Having this occur causes your pages and site to bleed PageRank. As you know, PageRank is a big factor in how Google ranks sites. The higher your PageRank, the better your rankings for the keyword terms you’re targeting.
In other words, websites using older CMS systems to manage their content usually don’t generate web pages crawlable by the search engines.
That’s why many search engine optimization pros like us don’t use them since one of the fundamental tenets to being successful online involves having a site that’s easy for the search engines to crawl and index.
With a few slight modifications though, WordPress is one content management system you can be sure will yield crawlable web pages.
And the best part is once you’re setup with a domain, design, categories and the necessary modifications to make WordPress into a CMS system, it’s as easy as pie to post new content online.
This post and SEO blog is one example of the easiness of this system.