Why is WordPress considered the leading platform for online bloggers? It’s an important question and one I feel many people tend to forget or ignore. If there was ever a more important question who’s answer has the ability to determine the level of optimization of a WordPress blog, then I’m certain this is it.

Alarmingly it could be said the majority of people in the blogging community would say the main reason why WordPress has taken the reigns, is because of it’s ability to function well with such a diverse range of plugins, plugins which are born almost daily out of arguably useless ideas.

Th truth of the matter is that the majority of the opensource(paid as well) plugins tend to sidetrack bloggers from the really important stuff. Mainly, “how does my site fair amongst my competitors in the SERP’s?“

If we were to run a study on all the WordPress blogs out there, attempting to find out the percentage of blogs perfectly designed for search engine listing versus those who aren’t, I’m sure most of us wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were something like 5% good versus 95% bad.

The current number of plugins in the official WordPress.org repository lists 6,705 active. It would be nice to think the overwhelming majority of these plugins were beneficial to the average blogger, but the truth is perhaps the opposite. Mainly the number we currently see before us is a result of a community members’ desire to market their own ideas through cheap, poorly designed scripts, manifested as WP plugins.

Countless blogs are being hacked everyday as a result of poorly written code on the authors behalf. The crazy thing is, if people were aware of the actual requirements necessary to creating a near perfectly optimized WordPress blog, they would more than likely steer clear of around 6,700 plugins listed at WordPress.org.

Which brings us back to our initial question, the one that this entire blog has been designed to answer…”Why is WordPress considered the leading platform for online bloggers?”

It’s simple – It has the least amount of unnecessary script out of any web-based platform, intern allowing all spiders to crawl it’s pages easily and effectively.

In saying this however, there are some things you can do to slightly improve the onsite SEO on your blogs to help gain a useful advantage over your competitors.

If you haven’t noticed already I’m currently using the Thesis theme by DIY Themes, whose intentions were to create a WordPress template set on filtering out the main problems associated with WordPress blogs, that is when taking SEO into consideration.

One malfunction in the WordPress script is it’s lack of ability to easily silo a sites Page Rank or link power.

As a rule of thumb, most blogging experts would normally agree the majority of the Page Rank streaming into a site should funnel as directly as possible into the post pages. This helps improve the chances of having your most important pages appear as high up in the SERP’s as possible.

The default settings of Thesis automatically passes a No Follow tag on all archive associated links except the category pages. This effectively means that all Page Rank flooding into your site will ONLY pass through the Category Archives before reaching your individual posts.

If you took some time to delve inside a blog struggling in the search engines, you would probably notice that a large amount of page rank is being unnecessarily directed to pages which serve no purpose when taking into consideration which pages are useful in the SERPS and which are not.

Another problem alot of blogs tend to encounter upon indexing and which indeed has an easy solution, is the Home link appearing in the header on every page.

The anchor text ‘Home’ will straight away force a spider to associate that particular keyword with your blogs home page, thereby almost nullafying any attempt you have made with your foreign links by inserting a useful keyword of which you should be trying to rank for with your index page.

Changing the anchor text of the Home link will effectively force every page to funnel page rank to your index, automatically targetting a keyword you are attempting to have it listed under in the SERP’s.

Before this post blows into an all out report I’m going to put an end to it there. The mission statement of SEOdrift.com has been published, therefore all future posts you see from here on out will in some way incorporate in that initiative.

Remember to keep up to date with everything. If you don’t have time to spend reading about all the latest news to do with SEO and WordPress, then don’t! Just subscribe here!

Until next time,

Josh Stanton
SEODrift.com

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