In the past couple of years site load speed has become more of a buzz conversation in the SEO community. As some of the theories go, the search engines believe that a quickly loading site is a site that delivers a better user experience.
Coded for Speed
Then, for the website or blog owner who is need of a CMS that inherently loads quickly, WordPress is a good choice. The way that the source is coded from the get-go makes for a speedy load time — this is good news for SEOs (not to mention website owners looking to compete in the search results).
The caveat here, though, is that if during development and customization, the code can get bloated and slow things down greatly. That’s why it’s important to work closely with a web development team that can trim the fat and speed things up with cleaner, more accessible coding techniques and grammar.
As the platform grows in popularity and use, the search engines have learned to crawl the WordPress architecture with both speed and accuracy. Of course, like stated above, if during customization the code is garbled for the sake of ‘getting things to work’ rather than launching a lean, working website, things can go awry here.
Keyword-rich URLs
We’ve mentioned permalinks elsewhere on the blog, namely here, but having strict control over URLs and the ability to add keyphrases is a strong contender for out-of-the-box SEO integration. So, we won’t get to far into permalinks since we’ve already done so.
Add Content Quickly & Easily
WordPress was built as a blogging platform and the platform has seen itself grow into a highly customizable CMS with blogging capabilities. The fact that blog posts and pages can be generated very quickly and easily speaks volumes for the site owner’s ability to ad fresh content and since text is the currency of search (for the most part), this is an important aspect to growing value for your website.
Text Navigation
Out of the box, WordPress generates text-based navigational links. This is key to crawling and indexing.
SEO Functionality & Updates
Additional SEO aspects and programming have been created by the WordPress community to allow for more control over on-page tactics — such as page titles and meta data. These plugins save time and error checking through their robust features.
Plugins that work well out-of-the-box:
The All-in-one-SEO plugin (basically allows page titles, descriptions and keyword lists to be managed on a page-by-page basis)
Google XML Sitemaps
Google Analyticator
What WordPress can do for SEO right from the start is a huge part of the overall equation, the other aspects of its robust and powerful nature should put it over the edge as one of the best platforms out there.
