Wordpress websites. Are they effective for SEO?
16/02/2010
Wordpress websites – are they effective for SEO?
Having been asked a large number of times ‘do you use Wordpress websites?’
This articles explains when we do use them and when they are useful or not useful.
Wordpress is often quoted as being easy to use. But is it?
Early versions of Wordpress with limited functionality were easy to use. But a good modern installation is complicated and we have encountered many confused and unsure how to add posts effectively.
Wordpress gains on this respect that it is often compared in usability to online content management systems such as Joomla which can also be confusing for some users to use. Compared to a good online CMS, a modern installation of Wordpress is confusing.
Wordpress is cheap.
This is often correct, but some hosting companies end up charging you a lot for this by hiding some of the charges (eg charging extra for a database, which is required by Wordpress) and then charging extra for database backups. So although a Wordpress website should be cheaper to setup and is for many people, we have encountered many actually paying more for their Wordpress website than for another type of website.
Are Wordpress websites good for SEO?
This of course depends how they are implemented. Earlier versions of Wordpress were poor and early ‘SEO modules’ clunky and inefficient for large numbers of pages. But Wordpress has evolved and if you use a modern install of Wordpress with a well chosen bundle of add-ons or plug-ins then you end up with a good product that is an effective search engine friendly website.
So if you take the time and technical know-how to get Wordpress working well then it can be good for small –medium websites.
It is worth stating that for high number of pages and articles Wordpress is inefficient, but it could be argued that once a website grew to being large there would be more funds to invest in a website which is better suited to larger websites.
And it is also worth comparing Wordpress to the ‘average’ ordinary business organisation website. Many of these alternative websites are appalling in terms of both code and search engine friendliness. A simple Wordpress website might not be great, and we would still argue not best for a company seeking top places on Google. But it will still be better than many of the non Wordpress websites built by other web 'designers' that we are given to ‘optimise’ for the search engines. We are shocked at the numbers of new websites we see built with non standard code, still using nested tables and absolutely no thought to SEO except the meta keywords tag being stuffed with an exceptionally long list of words.
Do you use Wordpress?
Of course! How we could we write on advise clients about Wordpress if we have not used it. And we carry out ongoing research for SEO comparing Wordpress to our own Articles system. But we do not use Wordpress for any standalone website for our business. This is because SEO is so key. Wordpress does have some useful features for articles and is an effective blogging tool.We use it for this, but in preference use the Cornish Articles system as the latter has been written to help SEO.
