Is Wordpress a must-have for SEOing?

Hey guys.

I got a question: Is Wordpress a must-have for successfully SEOing and ranking? Because i hate it creating themes for wordpress. I can do all by myself - and Wordpress is like a "cave" for me.

Thats all.


Thanks for reading.

x00srch

Nopes it isnt necessary to have WP to be successful,

But with WP you get good plugins and great flexibility.
If you hate creating WP themes then you buy them,they are pretty cheap.

jass11 said:

Nopes it isnt necessary to have WP to be successful,

But with WP you get good plugins and great flexibility.
If you hate creating WP themes then you buy them,they are pretty cheap.

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Well.. i dont need to buy some themes. I studied web design/development. At least.. creating WP-themes feels like beeing in a cave. I love it to create codes for a theme instead of creating a theme for an existing code.


Thanks for your reply, jass11.

No you don't have to use wordpress for SEO, not at all.

If you have the knowledge then go ahead, design your own website.

Great answers. Thank you guys. Helps me alot.

WP is terrible for SEO, and no plugin can change this.

wp is for folks who cant design or code. its much better to do a custom site IMHO.
however, for seo purposes the cleaner your code the better.

Jiggz said:

wp is for folks who cant design or code. its much better to do a custom site IMHO.
however, for seo purposes the cleaner your code the better.

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I disagree. Wordpress takes away the headache of manual coding and modifications. It gives you the comfort of changing the design, adding plugins, blogs etc with few clicks. There are tons of WP sites in the top ranks, you just have to make it unique, especially if you are using a common theme.

WP have too much good SEO plugins,and there are a lot of SEO Settings on WP Hintergrund

The fact is that a simple webpage designed in plain html or php is far better in terms of SEO if you know the basics of onpage optimization (Page Title, Meta Tags, HTML Tags, Keyword Optimization, Link Optimization, Image Optimization etc.)

The only way WP is good for SEO is because even if you do not know about optimizing your onpage SEO, there are many simple free plugin which let you configure the onpage SEO in few 1-2-3 steps.

So if you know about optimization and you do not want to use any CMS , you can just ignore WP.

islaw11 said:

I disagree. Wordpress takes away the headache of manual coding and modifications. It gives you the comfort of changing the design, adding plugins, blogs etc with few clicks. There are tons of WP sites in the top ranks, you just have to make it unique, especially if you are using a common theme.

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I agree. WP is a very big help to those SEO specialist that has a less knowledge about coding. I also find WP as a users friendly because I easily learned WP of that plug-ins.

I find WP flexible because it has wide variety of plugins. You can certain solve some problems and enhance your websites effectively compare building a custom side. If you need something extra, then you certainly need to go back to the web developer to get it done.

jiggz said:

wp is for folks who cant design or code.

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w t f ?

WP is terrible for SEO, and no plugin can change this.

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Looks like someone knows what he is talking about . I will remember your name

Yup , Wordpress sucks for SEO purposes. Some people think it's good because they are competing with other wordpress site. If you know SEO and can design your own site.. Then, I can say you have a great advantage of those who are using wordpress

KHer0 said:

Looks like someone knows what he is talking about . I will remember your name

Yup , Wordpress sucks for SEO purposes. Some people think it's good because they are competing with other wordpress site. If you know SEO and can design your own site.. Then, I can say you have a great advantage of those who are using wordpress

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So whats the Great advantage over building a site without WP and doing SEO?

How is a site ranked higher without WP vs. with WP?

Techxan said:

WP is terrible for SEO, and no plugin can change this.

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Someone PMed asked me to explain my statement. This is the reply I sent him, with the example sites removed.



WordPress is a content management system. it is designed to deliver the written word in a particular fashion, and make it extremely easy to find this information.

Since you cannot really effect the code in WordPress without hacking the core, many of the seo functions have to be filled in by a plugin that inserts them into the correct tags.

While this is fine for the title and description, it does nothing for heading tags.

In SEO, the content in the heading tag is weighted. Depending on the tag, the contents are given more weight than other words on the page.

The h1 tag is critical and you are allowed only one. The contents of this tag are the second most valuable for SEO on the page, it is supposed to be the main concept of the page. The h2-h6 tags are used for more information to support the tags above it.

In other words if your title is how to fish, your h1 (You are allowed 1 h1 tag, period. There can be only one) tag should re-enforce that. so

Title How to fish
H1 Fishing basics for beginners.

The h2 tags are supposed to support the previous h1 tag, so:

Title How to fish
<H1> Fishing basics for beginners.
<H2> Rod and reel
<h2> Cane Pole
<h2> Trout lines

In the above example, you will see that the title sets the subject of the page., the h1 reinforces the subject matter, and the H2's give more information about the contents of the H1.

If an h3 is used, it should support the h2 it is under, so:

Title How to fish
<H1> Fishing basics for beginners.
<H2> Rod and reel
<h3> Fly Fishing
<h3> Open faced reels
<h3> Closed faced reels
<h2> Cane Pole
<h2> Trout lines
By giving more emphasis for the words in these tags, you can tell the search engines exactly what the content is about. You are saying these words are important to the page.

Here are some Typical h tag structures from wp sites I have looked at in the last week.


XXXXXXX LINK REMOVED XXXXX


Not that there are 3 h1 tags, one for the page title, one for the article content title, and in this case, a blank one that affects how large the logo is. In addition to that, the H2 tag is a duplicate of the H1 tag for the most part.

This is because this theme uses the h tags to control font size, so any sub headings on the page will all be h2.

XXXXXXX LINK REMOVED XXXXX

You should be able to see the problem this introduces by now. No h1 tag in use, so the second most valuable piece of SEO information (aside from the title) is missing from the site. This is telling the search engines that "leave a reply cancel reply" and "men and women" is very important to this page, but this content is not supported by any other information on the page.

WordPress is designed to allow anyone to build a website that will display correctly, but it comes with default behavior behind the scenes that you never hear about.

If you have a page about a horse the vet treated that had stomach bloat, and you put it on your site about horses under the category "Equine health problems", and "Feeding horses the right way", WordPress will create one page and have two URL's pointing to it. (site.com/equine health problems/bloat, and site.com/feeding horses the right way/bloat). This will cause the search engines to think there are 2 pages on the site with the same content, because there are two URLs pointing to this page, which incurs a duplicate content penalty.

The content of a page includes all the content on the page. If you are using WordPress, there are areas of the theme called global areas. These areas display on every page or post, and if you don't put something there, the theme will just throw a default content there.

Think about what this means. You have a superb article, 500 words with razor sharp focus on your keyword, and you add it to a WordPress page.

When it displays, the page content will also include all words used in the navigation, sidebars and footers. You have just destroyed the keyword density and focus of the article, unless you adjust the article to restore the focus with this additional content taken into consideration.

You get seo points any time text composes 50 % of the full content on the page, in other words if your page is half code or smaller, you get points, but if it is over 50% code, you do not get these points.

In both of these examples above, because WP is a code hog, the ratio of text to code is 17%. This means that if your page has 100 words on it, 17 will be content,and the rest will be the code to display the content.

This is a typical percentage of code to text for WP.

There is more, but I hope I have answered your question.



Like anything, WP is most excellent for what it is designed to do, which is to deliver the written word Once you start hanging plugins on it, you are not using it for what it is designed for, and like anything, the efficiency goes to hell.

I can haul logs in a school bus, or take children to school in a log hauler. But no matter what I do to those vehicles, they will never be optimized for the task I am using them for.

WordPress is not designed for SEO, it was stuck on as an afterthought.

WP is far better than any other site if someone doesnt knows a coding process, its obvious when we use WP, it is all dynamic & has inbuilt capability of doing things itself, so in my opinion, WP is a best platform to use for SEO with their perfect on the go plugins.

The most successful websites I have built so far were non-wordpress sites (custom, to be precise). It is a coincidence IMO, but it proves that it's not a necessity to have Wordpress sites only.