What Makes WordPress Great for SEO
I’m often asked if search engines like Google prefer WordPress. In my opinion, the answer is no. The fundamental nature of search algorithms are not based on what CMS you choose, but rather the search engine’s ability to interpret your code, the quality of your content, how popular your website is, and if the search engine can trust you. That being said, there are some pretty compelling reasons why WordPress gives you an advantage over other platforms.
Content is King
As has been publicly confirmed over and over again by search engine companies, the quality of your content is the number one factor influencing your search rankings and will be the primary driving factor for rankings in the future (See http://goo.gl/huekf, http://goo.gl/aeI6kh, http://goo.gl/WScNv).
WordPress gives you the ability to publish high quality content using methods that are easy for the search engine indexing bots to understand. There are countless plugins, themes, and native WordPress features that allow you to optimize and add content to your site which are optimized for search engines.
The ease of use of these plugins, themes, and core WordPress features allows you to focus on generating content and not on building search optimized systems to display content. Your WordPress toolkit is an engine for creating high quality content for your site. You stay focused on creating valuable content thus increasing your chances for ranking well on search engines.
It’s Safe in the Middle
WordPress accounts for about 1 out of every 5 websites on the web. That’s a huge number and that penetration rate only seems to be increasing. This means that WordPress represents the largest marketplace for developers seeking to make search marketing tools for websites, resulting in tons of search optimized plugins and themes for you to use in your SEO campaigns.
The size of the opportunity in the WordPress marketplace translates into the largest number of high-quality search marketing tools available to webmasters on any platform. Because the economic incentive is so high, developers are also more likely to improve their tools as changes to search engine algorithms evolve.
Furthermore, many major SEO thought leaders and companies run their own sites on WordPress including Matt Cutts (Google’s head of web spam and most public figure regarding the Google algorithm). The takeaway here is that as techniques and tools evolve, the CMS of choice for the SEO community (WordPress) is sure to be at the forefront of SEO tools and techniques.
By choosing WordPress as your CMS you are helping to ensure that you’ll have a great selection of high quality search marketing tools in the future and a good probability that the tools you use today will be optimized for the future.