Wordpress and Search Engine Rank

Wordpress is, and always has been, one of the top choices for both newer and more seasoned internet marketers, casual bloggers and freelance web designers to use as a medium for their work. While not always considered the best option for creating a fast, reliable, feature-rich website, it is absolutely one of the easiest to pick up and use. Understanding some of the more intricate details of how the major search engines find, index and serve up web pages can make the difference between a website's success or failure. With that in mind, let's take a look at how a Wordpress blog/website can be setup to assist in dominating SERPs as well as some common pitfalls that lead many websites to the dreaded sandbox.

WP Plugins are your best friend when designing a site with Wordpress. They can be found for free in the official repository, and across the web. There are also tons of premium plugins which each have a specific purpose, but often times can be substituted for a free one. You just need to dig around for the right plugin for the job at hand. There are plugins which find content for you, some that automatically link posts to related posts around the web and some that do non SEO related jobs, like a contact form plugin, for example.

Getting to the meat of this subject, lets explore the growing trend of how many bloggers use plugins which search the internet for content, related to a specific keyword, and automatically make posts. The term 'content is king' means more than what many people give it credit for. The proper term really should be more like 'original content is king' or 'handwritten content is the best'. This is something that many people are overlooking, and ultimately does them in when their websites actually stops showing in search engine results.

Why would all of this content on one's website be bad? Because it is used over and over again by truckloads of other people using the same methods. WP plugins which automatically insert links to related material, on other websites carry less of a threat of having the whole domain ignored by spiders, but also need to be used in the right way. Having many pages deeplinked to other sites can be a very good thing, for sites on both ends of the links, but these plugins need to be monitered and adjusted sometimes. What I mean is that a site admin needs to regularly check these 'related blog' links and make sure that they are in fact pointing to sites that both are semantically related to the current post and does not appear to be a poorly performing website.

SEO is an evolving game and is full of contradictions, since it is ultimately defined by the search engines themselves. The best way to go about automatically creating content is to have those generated posts put straight to 'draft' status inside Wordpress and one by one edited by the admin, to genuinely create original content. This is not, of course, truly original content, but in the eyes of most major search engines, will not be considered duplicate.

All in all, whatever one's motive for creating a Wordpress blog or website, the creation process should follow some rough guidelines for a positive SEO experience and some good keyword rankings. This is in no way anywhere near a complete guide to even starting to set up a WP site, but a chance to get a little insight into some basic pros and cons of using some of these popular automatic this and that plugins.