As a Search Engine Optimisation company, Zool Digital do a lot of blogging ourselves and we also get asked a lot about the best platform to blog on for SEO purposes. Now, when people talk about blogging, they tend to mention WordPress – it seems to have a lot of love in the tech world at the moment and with good reason. Google seems to be sharing a lot of this love for WordPress recently – especially on its search engine results pages (SERPs), and this could be for many reasons. WordPress, for example, works well on mobiles, lets users customise their own URLs and has a logical page structure – a match made in heaven for Google.

WordPress currently powers around 75 million websites, and this number is growing daily. A little-known fact about WordPress is that eBay, Forbes, CNN and the New York Times websites are all built using it – and they are pretty big companies right! However, it’s not the actual platform itself that Google likes, it’s the format that the sites are built in – at the heart of WordPress success is that it is a blog based programme where users tend to input lots of text. Google loves text with a passion as the more text there is, the easier it is for their robots to crawl it, so the pages are indexed more frequently and quickly, and therefore it is tonnes easier for your potential customers to find you. The text-based design gives WordPress users a huge advantage over Flash-based sites as Google finds their graphic filled pages harder to crawl.

WordPress handles SEO well, it’s an open-source tool and a great Content Management System (CMS) that enables the user to update existing content and post new content really quickly. It is also packed with some great features which also help with SEO, such as: creating a hierarchy of categories and tags, informing all major search engines that a new post was created, inserting dashes into the URLs to separate words, and removing special characters from URL slugs.

The other great thing about WordPress is there is a myriad of plug-ins and extensions available to you, which can help to add real value to your site. These include:

  • No More 404s – a plug-in that uses your post ID’s when linking internally, rather than the actual page URL, to make it easier to re-jig your URLs at a later date if needed. This should help prevent the dreaded “404 error” page, and hence the name of the plug-in!
  • WordPress SEO by Yoast – Enables you to: add a description, title and keywords to every single post, add advanced canonical URLs, fine-tune your navigational links, use Google Analytics support, optimise your titles, generate Meta tags automatically, and create XML sitemaps for you. Worth the investment definitely!

So, is WordPress good for SEO?  The answer is a resounding yes! So, there you have it, the reasons why WordPress is good for SEO – but remember that it isn’t WordPress itself that Google loves but the structure it uses – so keep your post-text-based with a logical page structure and Google will return the love!

If the thought of blogging for your business fills you with horror, then please call us on 01625 238 770 for a chat about how Zool can help you with all your content needs. For a full list of our services, head over to www.zooldigital.co.uk

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WordPress Websites and SEO: A Match Made in Heaven?

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As a Search Engine Optimisation company, Zool Digital do a lot of blogging ourselves and we also get asked a lot about the best platform to blog on for SEO purposes. Now, when people talk about blogging, they tend to mention WordPress – it seems to have a lot of love in the tech world at the moment and with good reason. Google seems to be sharing a lot of this love for WordPress recently – especially on its search engine results pages (SERPs), and this could be for many reasons. WordPress, for example, works well on mobiles, lets users customise their own URLs and has a logical page structure – a match made in heaven for Google.

WordPress currently powers around 75 million websites, and this number is growing daily. A little-known fact about WordPress is that eBay, Forbes, CNN and the New York Times websites are all built using it – and they are pretty big companies right! However, it’s not the actual platform itself that Google likes, it’s the format that the sites are built in – at the heart of WordPress success is that it is a blog based programme where users tend to input lots of text. Google loves text with a passion as the more text there is, the easier it is for their robots to crawl it, so the pages are indexed more frequently and quickly, and therefore it is tonnes easier for your potential customers to find you. The text-based design gives WordPress users a huge advantage over Flash-based sites as Google finds their graphic filled pages harder to crawl.

WordPress handles SEO well, it’s an open-source tool and a great Content Management System (CMS) that enables the user to update existing content and post new content really quickly. It is also packed with some great features which also help with SEO, such as: creating a hierarchy of categories and tags, informing all major search engines that a new post was created, inserting dashes into the URLs to separate words, and removing special characters from URL slugs.

The other great thing about WordPress is there is a myriad of plug-ins and extensions available to you, which can help to add real value to your site. These include:

  • No More 404s – a plug-in that uses your post ID’s when linking internally, rather than the actual page URL, to make it easier to re-jig your URLs at a later date if needed. This should help prevent the dreaded “404 error” page, and hence the name of the plug-in!
  • WordPress SEO by Yoast – Enables you to: add a description, title and keywords to every single post, add advanced canonical URLs, fine-tune your navigational links, use Google Analytics support, optimise your titles, generate Meta tags automatically, and create XML sitemaps for you. Worth the investment definitely!

So, is WordPress good for SEO?  The answer is a resounding yes! So, there you have it, the reasons why WordPress is good for SEO – but remember that it isn’t WordPress itself that Google loves but the structure it uses – so keep your post-text-based with a logical page structure and Google will return the love!

If the thought of blogging for your business fills you with horror, then please call us on 01625 238 770 for a chat about how Zool can help you with all your content needs. For a full list of our services, head over to www.zooldigital.co.uk

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