Lately, I’ve been exploring some super-niches. Niches with high traffic, but low competition. My classification for them is if x=# of searches, and y=number of Google results for that phrase, y<2x. In doing this, I needed some quick and dirty promotion methods, but I realized that I was ranking ahead of time. Before I got links. I’m chocking that up to the wordpress architecture. Allow me to explain why.
- Google Hates One Page Websites, and Wordpress is Never One Page.
If you do one wordpress blog entry, you generate, off the bat, one page for each category the entry goes in, and one for each tag. In addition, there’s “About Me” pages, and really dozens of other random pages. So even a quickly rigged site appears to have some degree of development.
- Wordpress Has Astounding Internal SEO
Wordpress’s internal SEO honestly cuts my work in half. By tagging with the desired keywords(split up, and as a phrase), it automatically gives you internal links using the relevant terms, pointing to your article. In addition, for each of those tags, you have a desired keyword in the URL pointing to your article. Beyond that, it handles <h1> tags beautifully, gives you an easy way to put in blogroll (read:affiliate) links that are site wide, and automatically no-follows most undesirable links.
- Wordpress Can Aggregate without Backlinks
Blog and ping still works. It takes lighting fast hands, and a fair amount of luck, but you can get indexed just by pinging google’s XMLRPC service over and over. That’s ridiculous in today’s ecommerce economy!
- Wordpress Creates Absolutely Bizarre Longtail Possibilities
With all the different entries going into different tags, categories, and staying on the front page, there’s a tremendous amount of different orders the entries can appear in. Just on the basis that most posts of some tags that cross over, and some that don’t, it’s possible to have dozens of different combinations of articles(or article summaries) appearing on the tag pages, and category pages. Doing that means that you come in for a LOT of different longtail.
- It Cuts the Work of Backlink Gathering in Half
Try it some day, off an IP you’re about to change. Scrape Google blog search for your keyterm. Dump all the urls into the submit trackback section, and let it fly. Wordpress itself is it’s own spamming tool. It’s kind of odd.
- RSS Feeds and Myself Will Someday Get Married
I love RSS feeds. They get you indexed like lightning first off, but secondly, via the various aggregator services, you actually get a page that links SOLELY to your own site. It’s a running list of your links! Places like icerocket as well are great to get you off the ground, and indexed.
- Subscriptions Will Be Mistress (Sorry RSS feeds)
Subscriptions are a unique kind of thing. They take the guess work out of people returning to your site. It’s no longer a question of forgetting to check that bookmark. They’re notified. They’re up to date. And I’ll be honest, programming your own RSS feed is obnoxious and slow. Wordpress having it is a godsend.
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Posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 12:05 pm in the category:seo.
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December 20th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Wordpress is a steaming pile of crap if you ask me. I guess it’s good if you wanna be stuck with bad code and a new exploit every other week.
December 20th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
@blackhatseo:
Security-wise, you’re right. It gets exploited to hell and back. Proper pemissions helps, but still isn’t perfect.
This was from an SEO perspective, not a security one.
Although, if you’re really worried about security, remove the footprints, and you’re fine most of the time. Kill the “Powered By Wordpress”, “Template by XYZ”, anything that’s static, and an indicator of a wordpress blog.
After that, you’re pretty fine.
December 20th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Wordpress is a plague. The worst thing that happend to the web. We have so many wannabes publishing crappy posts daily and flooding the index of search engines mentioning articles in which other mention other articles and so on…
I long for the days when you needed to have some skill or hire a coder to have a site and cost you money. Kept the quality of the index and the internet!
And blachatseo is right about security. Look at adhelper.com’s links in Yahoo! to see vulnerabilities at work.
December 20th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Heh yeah. It is. It makes SEO too easy. You still have work to do, but it does a lot in the first place. And yes yes yes, I’m awknowledging the security problem! Argh.
December 20th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
[…] blog posting was syndicated through Spinn and talked highly about Wordpress blogs. The Title was “7 Reasons Why Wordpress is the Ultimate SEO Tool”. I am not going to reiterate a thing but if you need some reasons to justify your decision to go […]
December 20th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Wordpress != Ultimate SEO Tool - I’m definitely going to have to disagree although it may be for Newbs that can’t code
December 20th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
heh once again, notice the context. I’m talking in terms of super niches. For things that are not worth a huge amount of effort, Wordpress does an excellent job of providing an SEO setup with minimal work.
Although you are of course allowed to disagree.
December 20th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Don’t get me wrong. Wordpress is great, but I think Drupal could Wordpress a run for its money. Wordpress is good for people who just want to blog, but Drupal is also very SEO friendly, more flexible and loaded with apps (modules).
December 21st, 2007 at 6:07 am
Hey,
I love wordpress as well for its simplicity. but how come you don’t use pretty urls on this blog? was it you forgot to set it up and now its too late or other reason?
December 21st, 2007 at 8:30 am
@Janusz:
Yup. I never saw this picking up any kind of steam until it was already doing quite well. And right now, while growth is so large, I don’t want to modify anything that makes google ‘adjust’ to the changes; the time lost would be momentum lost.
December 21st, 2007 at 9:57 am
Anybody know a source of high CTR wordpress templates?
I’m not looking for a domainer template or a cheezy “no content above the fold” template that is fashionable with l0sers today. I’m looking for a template that’s very simple and only uses whitespace to separate potential advertising areas from the rest of the site.
I’ve found that I can double the CTR of my sites easily by removing visual boundaries from contextual ads — without alienating viewers. Any good wordpress templates for this, or do I have to make my own?
December 21st, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Why did you said “That’s ridiculous in today’s ecommerce economy!” in point 3 .
I dont get it.
and
What do you mean
“off an IP you’re about to change”,
December 21st, 2007 at 10:49 pm
“Off an IP you’re about to change” means that if you submit a ridiculous amount of trackbacks without a proxy, akismet will flag your ass really fast, and you won’t be able to send trackbacks in the future. Changing IPs can help dodge this issue.
That’s ridiculous in today’s ecommerce economy!”
Means that Google should forsee the abuse that comes with deep-indexing sites that have no backlinks, if they are only receiving pings, and nothing else.
December 22nd, 2007 at 1:25 am
“Don’t get me wrong. Wordpress is great, but I think Drupal could Wordpress a run for its money.”
I think Squidoo gives both of those a run for their money. Google would fuck Squidoo’s dead corpose. Does anyone know of any software to create lenses on automation?
December 22nd, 2007 at 2:09 am
Squdioo rewound maybe 6 months, and I’d agree with you. They got the manual smackdown, which didn’t help. Also, I get annoyed by it on the level that it’s hard to tell how ranking is going if someone else used my target keywords before, and promoted that heavily. Mine goes beneath their result, and I have no idea what my progress is until I outrank them.
That being said, yes, Squidoo is also an excellent tool. I just have a grudge or two.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:23 am
word press is excellent for seo. especially how easy it is to change the look and feel, mod re-write for seo friendly url’s. theres a bunch of seo plugins you can download as well
January 6th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
[…] I agree that wordpress is a fantastic piece of software I think it’s important to realise that it has it’s place and that place is not […]
January 18th, 2008 at 5:20 am
I love / hate wordpress… I prefer writing my own tools and stuff, but it is great if you want to whack up some content real fast.
But I agree in that wordpress makes it too easy, I actually have skills and ability, but my worth has been diminished somewhat due to the fact a 12 year old kid can install wordpress nowadays!
January 18th, 2008 at 6:08 am
heh very true m0nkeymafia.
The ultimate problem with programmers is that we can program ourselves out of being needed.
January 26th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
…and then there’s #8 which is that Wordpress.org has the finest army of guerrilla developers around–keeping us locked and loaded with the best bloging plugins around.
February 16th, 2008 at 3:58 am
Wordpress that cool, but me more like ‘Oport’
March 12th, 2008 at 12:42 am
Well- I just want to say htnkas- I found this post to be very informative.
I would also like to ask- have you heard of xsitepro- and what do you think of its capabilities for being indexed and ranking well in comparison to wordpress?
Just to note- I have a free blog on blogger for quite a while now and it has not been indexed by google no matter how hard I try. alos have a free blog on wordpress that without any effort whatosver got indexed on google and got 49 visitors in the first month without any effort- just ublished and that was it. so I agree that wordpress has some kind of “magic”. I am right now experimenting but would really like to know if you think it is better to have a wordpress blog or an xsite pro site (for seo purposes).
Aslo when you wrote about looking into niches do you put the quots and allintitle to be able to analyze or just the quotes or no quotes at all to figure out the number of results and compare?
Thanks for any help,
Eren
March 16th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
The the thing that makes WordPress the best is the huge community that supports and upgrades it. Others will come and go byt wordpress adapts.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:55 pm
There are a lot of things you can do with wordpress to make your *cough* quality *cough* stand out and appear less spammy.
A few posts certainly can get you pretty much instant traffic and since Google’s blog search is used by lots of folks each post brings you a few instant visitors.
“Ultimate” - Not sure about that. I’ve got some personal systems that do just about everything wordpress does and I do better long term with them.