In most of our development work we use the WordPress platform. To many of you WordPress is just a blogging content management system, buuuut I tend not to agree, because in our vast experience we’ve successfully created feature-rich websites on WordPress for all kinds of clients. Besides being a flexible tool for development, WordPress and Google go together like a horse and carriage. WordPress takes care of 80-90% of your SEO, according to Matt Cutts (head of WebSpam for Google since 2000)

Google DOES NOT use meta keywords

Most of our clients are stressing about their keywords and don’t want to understand that it’s their content that creates keywords and brings traffic and not just a set of words they want us to make up for them. One of our current clients’ had an issue with a competitor where the lady actually threatened her with a law suit if our client did not change her meta keywords. Well, only if she knew that Google Webmaster Central Blog announced back in September 2009 that they don’t use the keywords meta tag for their indexing but instead they emphasize on the <title> tag and the description meta tag.

Users should be aware though that, Google is not the only Search Engine, and according to comScore.com Google’s slice in the search engine market is around 65%. Yes, that is a lot, but what about the rest of the search engines like Yahoo! and Bing and many other ones on other local markets? Some other search engines are known to use the keywords meta tag, but you should decide which Search Engine to focus on for your marketplace.

The description meta tag

Instead of focusing and stressing about useless things, you should be directing your attention towards your description meta tag. You should create a meaningful description for each of your pages, the description should not be longer than 160 characters including spaces and should describe the contents of the page. The ability to create a good description inline with your page’s content will most probable index that page for a certain keyword or key phrase. The description then will be used by Google to display that text snippet under the title of your site in their search results. Should you lack the description for a certain page Google will index the first 160 characters of that page and use it in their results.
There is no need for you to learn html or play around with the code, because there are many useful plugins for WordPress that enable you to edit your meta tags for each page and post that you create.

In conclusion

As regards WordPress we cannot stop singing their praises and will continue developing great looking websites full of features and functionality. We here at Vitriol Consult are more than happy to give our customers the best of the best. Guess what, we even built our own web-site on WordPress.

Till next time…

~ Iurie Vlasov

Nowadays the level of development of systems like WordPress is so advanced to allow simple modifications of the system without touching the core of the platform to be adapted under any needs thus keeping lower costs, less time consumption, security levels and better future development of features and extra needs. That’s exactly why high-level clients use it for their websites:

People magazine: http://stylenews.peoplestylewatch.com/
The Prime Minister of United Kingdom: http://www.number10.gov.uk/
The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/topnews/blog-index.html
Visit Oregon: http://visittheoregoncoast.com/
FORD: http://www.thefordstory.com/
Golf Royalty: http://golf-royalty.com/
Republican Governors Association: http://www.rga.org/

These and many more examples of WordPress customization to fit ones needs can be shown. As follows are the reasons why WordPress is a good system:

1) WordPress will never out-date.
In fact, WordPress is a system used by millions around the globe, allowing for the best and largest “bug-checking” team in the world, and once glitches in the system are revealed WordPress comes up with an immediate upgrade. And even if it is not about bugs, even if it is about making the system better there will always be new updates therefore the system will never out-date.

2) WordPress helps you save time and money
Instead of spending time on waiting until a good, bugless and expensive custom system is developed, it takes considerably less time and resources for developers to concentrate on creating features needed by the client to be installed into WordPress and work on the design of the front end. Also, learning to use WordPress is much easier as there is plenty of  documentation available on the internet, which is much easier than having someone explain “how the new super advanced custom CMS works”.

3) WordPress is quicker and more optimized
Wordpress is known to be one of the best DB driven systems available at the moment, thus being one of the quickest Open Source platforms on the internet. Moreover it has the ability of optimizing the database so as not to lose data and work faster under heavy traffic.

4) WordPress is the best for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is a fact, WordPress driven sites get indexed by Search Engines much faster and better than custom system driven sites do, due to the cleanliness of the code and the features it has.

5) Anyone can use WordPress
At any point in time should the client decide to update his site with new features, new design etc it will be enough to hire a WordPress developer and not look for someone to understand someone else’s code.

There are many other reasons why one should use WordPress, and mainly that is why many important companies around the world have decided to opt for WordPress.