DAY 10: Developing On WordPress Engine

In today’s lesson we will be exploring the blog system WordPress and how to use this to leverage our SEO efforts. You can see the previous post: Day 9: Cascading Style Sheet Design to help you understand the technical aspects of SEO as well.

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

- Steve Jobs -

To be the best you have to use the best

WordPress is by far the most popular blog engine online and for a good reason; it’s not only open source, totally free, extremely powerful, it’s also loved by the search engines and Google in particular.

WordPress is like a search engine spider’s magnet, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to leverage on that!

The moment of truth

This is it; finally after 10 days of hard labor, you are finally ready to take the next step by officially designing your site.

In the past 10 days, you have worked so hard and methodically to
prepare a solid base for your site, from the best possible keywords, structure design and optimization, architecture and navigability; there’s just a final step left for you before giving birth to your site.

And that step is choosing the right engine support for your site.

The time of static sites is over, we are in the WEB 2.0 era, whether
you want it or not. Now, if you had to chose an engine support for your site, even if it’s a static one, which one would it be:

• Support static pages but not WEB 2.0 technology.
• Support static pages and WEB 2.0 technology.

Of course, one should go with the one that supports static pages and WEB 2.0 technology even if you don’t implement it, at least it’s available for you if you want it to.

Reverse Thinking

Everybody knows that blogs helps build traffic towards your site, and probably everybody also knows that WordPress is the best blogging platform. If you still don’t know why, I invite you to read my article “WordPress – The Best Platform For Your Site”.

The common thinking is to build your site, and then add a WordPress blog to it. That’s not a bad idea, but I have a better one.

Why don’t you instead start with a WordPress installation and build your site on it, so rather than having just your blog site loved by Googlebot, you could have your entire site loved!

The best thing is that WordPress is so configurable that you could run an entire traditional site on it, without ever using blog at all!

That’s right, you can create and/or recreate any kind of site you wish using WordPress, that is not only build blogs.

What kind of site can I build with WordPress?

Quite simply put, you can build any kind of site you want.

You can append and build any combination you like:

• Blog
• Static Site
• Site + Blog
• Site + Directory
• Site + Forum
• Site+ Forum + Blog + Directory
• E-commerce
• Etc…

You are only limited by your imagination.

The reason why this is possible is simply because WordPress offers you 2 ways to publish your content:

• Blog Posts – traditional blog components, although if you are good with your design you could integrate them easily as traditional webpage with all the blog post features and capability deployed if you wished so.
• Pages – Pages behave just like any normal webpage in appearance, but again, carries all the power and capabilities of a WordPress blog.

In WordPress you have full control over the layout, and despite the fact that you can use a general template for your entire site, you also have the possibility to create custom individual template for each page of your site!

There’s nothing WordPress can’t do that an ordinary site can.

I can easily build a site with WordPress that looks nothing like a blog, and you’d never guess in a million year that it’s not an ordinary site, except for the search engines results it gets!

Exercise

Well, this is what you have been waiting for in the past 10 days my friends! Of course it’s now time to build you website!

From a SEO point of view, you already know all what you need to know in order to build a SEO friendly site.

This will conclude the second part of this 21 Days SEO Mastery course, make sure that your site is ready before moving on to the next lesson!

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.