Best SEO web development environment

The broad consensus is that WordPress is the best for SEO purposes (although it sucks as a development environment compared to Rails, Django, various other Java environments, etc.). I'm a coder, but an SEO newbie, who cringes at the thought of having to deal with an inferior technology like WordPress, but I'll suck it up if the SEO benefits really are worth it.

So, my newbie question: Are the SEO benefits of a site built with WordPress *really* worth abandoning all sorts of powerful alternative technologies that one could use (like Rails)?

Thanks.

If you have a good reason for building something custom yourself, then have at it. If you just want to create a site, and sacrifice of a bit of that control for ease of use & the SEO benefits then there is nothing wrong with wordpress.

You really can't compared Wordpress to Rails / Django, they are two different beasts designed to do different things.

devildog said:

The broad consensus is that WordPress is the best for SEO purposes (although it sucks as a development environment compared to Rails, Django, various other Java environments, etc.). I'm a coder, but an SEO newbie, who cringes at the thought of having to deal with an inferior technology like WordPress, but I'll suck it up if the SEO benefits really are worth it.

So, my newbie question: Are the SEO benefits of a site built with WordPress *really* worth abandoning all sorts of powerful alternative technologies that one could use (like Rails)?

Thanks.

Click to expand...

I cannot comment on the two platforms Rails & Django, as am no expert coder. But, I guess PHP or html are as good as wordpress for seo, if you can do the coding right.

seoguru13 said:

I cannot comment on the two platforms Rails & Django, as am no expert coder. But, I guess PHP or html are as good as wordpress for seo, if you can do the coding right.

Click to expand...

Wordpress is PHP & HTML though.

DesignEx said:

Wordpress is PHP & HTML though.

Click to expand...

That's why I said they are as good or even better for SEO

O.k., we're off track.

The big benefit of WordPress over a million other development environments is that the WordPress team has spend huge amounts of time optimizing for SEO, building in things like news service pinging and other features I don't know about. PHP (which sucks) and HTML just happen to be the tools they used to build WP and the SEO features into WP. You *could* build them yourself potentially. So, does anyone know the answer to these questions:

1- What *exactly* are all the SEO features that WordPress has built into its system?

2- For someone who really just wants the best SEO traffic he can get, is it worth using WordPress to leverage off of those features, rather than going with a much more powerful, flexible development environment that does not have those features?

There are lots of sites out there that get huge traffic that don't use WordPress, of course.


Thanks

If you're such a coding genius that you can throw around blanket statements like "PHP sucks" then you should be able to grab a copy of WP and check it out for yourself.

It's not the language or the platform that matters - it's what you do with it.

Agreed, that's why WP is so much better for SEO purposes. I just want to know what *exactly* it's doing that gives it that reputation. I'm assuming it's a lot more than just pinging the news servers every time you put up a post.

And agreed, it's what you do with the tools that's most important.

Let me re-phrase: it's commonly accepted that PHP sucks relative to many other languages and development environments. I take this as a given and widely accepted, but if you want to disagree, that's fine. Just don't do it with me because I don't really care and don't want to fight about it. I'm not religious about my tools. I just happen to be competent at some and so I'd rather use the ones I'm competent with, and build good SEO functions into my system, if I can. What I have been told repeatedly is not to do that. Just use WordPress.

I'm happy to do that. I just want to know *why*? What is it doing that makes it so good at SEO? And why is it hard to replicate that SEO functionality in any other system?

Goddamn uppity noobs.

There is NO SEO benefit to any specific platform, whether that's WordPress, Drupal, or any other exotic concoction.

WordPress (WP) is effectively a content management system (CMS) that can be used as a blogging platform. Sure, you can add themes, and plugins to make WP, SEO friendly, but straight out of the box, it has no SEO benefit, compared to for example, a site made of just php/html and css. People like it because it's convenient, and easy to use. There's nothing stopping you from creating your own CMS.

In terms of on page SEO, the search engines (in the main) are textual beasts and are only interested in text, tags and a few other things, not the platform a site was coded in.