What is best website for SMB for SEO? WordPress or static site?
I have come across a question by a local business. When it comes to SEO, is there a difference between a website built on WordPress and one using any other means (static pages, website templates, etc)? WP is very powerful. You can have a static home page or blog entries on the home page, a mixture of "pages" and "categories", etc. Can a WP site rank as well (or better) than standard sites? Let's assume the site is for a web designer or even a restaurant for this question. Let's also assume that website content is exactly the same.
3 Answers
A lot of people say 'Wordpress is great for SEO' without really backing this up.
I'd agree with this, but with two caveats:
- Install the 'All In One SEO' plugin, which greatly expands the SEO options available to the Wordpress user.
- Use this plugin to block access to your archive pages, reducing the illusion of duplicate content on your site for the search engines.
In practice, the impact of your internal and 'on-page' SEO is likely to be small compared to your backlinks and 'off-page' SEO activities.
Wordpress is probably more appropriate to your small business end user by every other criteria as well.
You could take a look at HubSpot, founded by one of the hosts of this site. One of their offerings is a CMS set up to be optimized for SEO -- not only in terms of the HTML output, but more in terms of tools surrounding the site such as data mining, funnel analysis etc.
Wordpress can be excellent for SEO. It outputs good proper HTML and it has a plethora of good plugins available, including plugins to help with SEO & analytics. The popular Google blogger Matt Cutts has a good overview of Wordpress from a SEO perspective (he's a Wordpress user himself).
When it comes to SEO, is there a difference between a website built on WordPress and one using any other means (static pagesIf you could hypothetically get Wordpress and a static site to output exactly the same HTML, then they will rank identically. HTML from a dynamic system such as Wordpress is not inherently 'tainted' in any way.
In practice, if you hand-code every line of HTML to perfection, then you might gain a tiny advantage over the 'one size fits all' output from a CMS / blog. But this is very time consuming, and requires lots of knowledge about semantic HTML, browser issues, SEO etc.
If you're already familiar with Wordpress, then using it will save you lots of time and effort. On the other hand if you're new to Wordpress, you should realize that it has a learning curve, and you'll initially spend a lot of time just getting to know Wordpress.
So the most important question is (once again :-) ) not which tool to use, but rather the skills and know-how of the designer.
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I should mention that I have started building a site for them using WordPress and the Thesis theme. This theme has lots of built-in SEO functions from the start. It is also my feeling that this site can be turned over, with a little training, for updates by the business owner. My feeling was that a hand-coded site would be too difficult to make changes or add content. My concern was that Google would rank it as a "blog" and not a full-on business website. I will check out the CMS offered by HubSpot. I have heard of it but haven't checked it out yet. Thanks everyone. – Doug M 14 years ago
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@DougM: Google does not discount or deduct from the pagerank for blogs. If that's your concern, and you're happy with Wordpress, then don't worry about a thing just keep using Wordpress. – Jesper Mortensen 14 years ago
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If you are using Thesis theme then that is a very good move. From the transition point you would want to inform the business how not to mess up the SEO tags and be current with the new "pages" and "posts". Jesper is right on with the Google treatment of the WP driven site/blog. – Aka Ak 14 years ago
the answer would be it all depends, if you are going for a blog oriented website for good and depending on resources available to you you might go with wordpress, but i don't really see the reason for limiting yourself
if you are not sure about what the future might hold or if you would rather want various other content types mixed then i would definitely go with joomla, yeah...you might say you are biased having invested your last 3 years doing that tool, but frankly speaking you should give it a shot, and this goes even if you are considering purely blog content. the main idea is why limit yourself
the power of joomla lies much in the various extensions that are available (current count at about 4000 such most and the best of them freely available ) and for blogging purpose the very popular k2 extension would definitely serve your purpose and much more than that, with k2 you would be able to build a directory, a blog...
the joomla community is alive and waiting for any questions you might have at the joomla forum, good luck...
