Considering the business I’m in, it only makes sense to use tools that make building search engine friendly websites more efficient. Which is why I use Wordpress for a number of my projects because it’s internal architecture is designed to be search engine friendly.

WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.

WordPress comes with several built in search optimization tools, including the ability to use .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling, and pinging. There are also a number of third party plugins and hacks which can be used for search engine optimization (SEO).

excerpt from wordpress.org – Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress

It’s out of the box features and the various Wordpress SEO plugins available combined with it’s ease of use make it a very powerful tool. I’ve been working with content managements systems for a number of years now and hands down.. I think Wordpress is the most search engine friendly on the market.

So whether you want to start a blog, build a website using a content management system or both… I recommend using Wordpress. It makes doing business online easy and affordable.

Need some help building a website? Check out our website services or contact us for a free consultation.

I’ve been the webmaster for Rafting.com since 2001 when we built the site out for the very first time. Finally seven years later, our virtual web team devised a plan to redesign the site. We decided to build it using Wordpress as CMS (content management system).

From white site to launch, the project took us 8 months (2 years if you consider the theory process). The new website went live on February 28, 2008. We have plans for unveiling the new Rafting.com Blog (1 installation for both the site and the blog) during the first week of April.

With the relaunch of the website we decided that is was only fitting to make Rafting.com “The Definitive Whitewater Rafting Go To Site.” To move in that direction we added nearly 160 new pages of content to the rivers and regions directory, making the site over 230 pages and growing.

So Why Wordpress?

We chose Wordpress because 2 years ago we started planning the development of the Rafting.com Blog and we soon realized after WP 2.1 how easy it was to use WP as a CMS. Secondly, we also chose Wordpress because of all the functionality available to make rafting.com a very robust, yet simple website. Third, using a CMS allows the publishing tasks to anyone on our virtual team without having to know a lick of html. Finall, we used WP because its so dang search engine friendly.

Kudos to the Web Team

Jamie Low – http://SearchEngineMarketing.com: Search Master
Tessa Sibbet – http://www.Rafting.com: Content Manager / Editor
Sammy Russo – http://SearchFriendlyWebDesign.com: Site Admin & Theme Development
Joe David – http://www.DavidDesign.com: Maps & Graphic Design
Malina Dunk – http://Blog.AOrafting.com: Writer / Editor
Robyn Suddeth – http://Blog.AOrafting.com: Writer / Editor

Nice work people. After only a month of being relaunched we have nearly 99% indexation of all new pages and 100% re-indexation of original content on their new URLS.

I run several websites the are powered by Wordpress… 11 to exact. About a month or so ago I sitting in my office counting the number of Wordpress powered sites I run, and thinking what a nightmare it is to keep all the various plugins up-to-date.

It’s quite a hassle to have to spreadsheet the version of all the Wordpress Plugins on a per site basis so I can more easily find out which ones are out f date. Plus having to monitor all the feeds from the plugin developer sites. But that hassle no longer exists.

With Wordpress 2.3, the plugin interface of the administration panel now tells you when there is an updated version of a particular plugin, along with a link to the Extend section of the Wordpress site so you can quickly download the most recent version.

Couple this with one of my favorite plugins “One Click Installer” (a plugin installer via admin panel), and I can quickly update all my Wordpress powered sites.

Thank You Wordpress Development Team!

The blog; what can be said that hasn’t been said before? In all truth, very little, but there is still a seeming lack of businesses willing to take up the “challenge” of running their own blog. Those that have done so often report their findings and invariably they are positive reviews of both the blogging process and the results of their business blog. In a bid to hammer the point home we’ve compiled a list of ten advantages to establishing and maintaining a business blog.

It is important to note the word “busy” in the title of this article. It isn’t there simply because it begins with a B and lends itself perfectly to the alliteration in the title. It’s meant to outline the fact that a blog is at its finest when it is regularly filled with quality content. A blog with no content is just a template.

1 – Quick And Easy

Two words that every business owner and manager loves. A blog is simple to set up even for the technologically challenged. There exist a number of free blogging services, and while these aren’t ideal for a business blog they do offer a way to start. Setting up a blog is not like setting up a website. In the worst case scenario you will need to install a software application on your website and tinker with a few settings.

2 – Inexpensive Setup

The only word more popular than quick and easy is inexpensive. To integrate a blog into the page of your site costs very little money, especially as somebody within your organization can usually do it. Even outsourcing the task will cost only a couple of hundred dollars. Remember that a blog could become one of the most powerful marketing weapons you have in your arsenal and consider that a couple of hundred dollars might just pay a salesperson for one day’s work.

3 – Provides Easy Access To Company News

A business blog can be written in one of numerous styles, or a combination of these. One huge benefit is the ability to inform your customers of any changes, new products, latest offers, and much more. This, in turn, can lead to direct sales. People love to frequent blogs and pass their time reading the same ones on a regular basis. Captivate your audience with compelling content and you will receive a growing list of market leads. Remember that individual blog readers generally prefer a personable style but if your operation is a business-to-business one then you will need to vary your style accordingly.

Typically, companies have used newsletter and e-newsletters to offer this kind of regular contact with their customers and potential customers. Using a blog is easier and it can be updated much more regularly than when offering a weekly or monthly newsletter.

4 – Search Engine Friendly

Search engine optimization is a particularly beneficial form of online marketing. It can be used to gain search engine traffic for given keywords or search terms. Your blog offers the opportunity to promote your website for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords. Search engines particularly like promoting blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis.

5 – Appear Accessible

It doesn’t matter whether you are not, but you and your company will appear to be more accessible especially if you allow freedom for all your visitors to post comments. Accessibility is often a stumbling block for many potential customers that still prefer to deal with companies offline. A blog makes you more approachable and so alleviates this concern.

6 – Appear Authoritative

The appearance of authority is also important to online businesses. Customers will be much more likely to use your service or purchase your goods if they see you as an authority on a particular subject. Give your views on the latest events in your industry, offer reviews of related items and comparisons of several items. Do anything, within reason, that makes you look like an authority on your topic area.

7 – Brand Awareness

The more a customer hears the name of your company the more likely they will be to remember it. It takes, on average, around seven items of direct communication between you and your customers to make a sale. A blog with hundreds of posts gives you the opportunity to name drop your company occasionally and ensure that your readers think of you next time they are looking for a particular product or service.

8 – Relationship Building

Another difficult aspect of building a relationship with your customers online is building a rapport with them. Because a blog enables you to speak more freely and in a more informal and personable style than your website does, your readers will soon feel like they know you. The more they know, like, and trust you the more likely they are to visit your main site, click your links, purchase your product, and line your pockets with virtual gold.

9 – Gain An Insight Into Your Customers

A business blog enables you to gain insight into your customers. It does this in several ways. Predominantly, by allowing your customers to leave comments on your posts, you get a good feel for how they take to everything you say. You can also track which posts are being read more often and which generate a greater number of clicks, emails, and much more. As far as market and customer research goes this is hugely beneficial information.

10 – Reduce Calls And Emails

OK, this isn’t one to tell your readers but you can use a blog to pre-empt questions that customers might have. By sending readers to your blog you can gain all of the above benefits and you may reduce the amount of niggling questions that you get asked by customers. Of course, you might also receive a lot more orders by email, but nobody wants to reduce those emails.

Maintaining A Successful Business Blog

While there are free blogging services available they generally offer ad-supported blogs with a restricted amount of templates and options. To truly take advantage with a business blog your best bet is to use a commercial application or pay for a commercial service. These enable you to integrate the blog into your own domain incorporating your own design. This ensures that you offer the full benefit to site visitors while making it easier to point blog visitors toward the appropriate pages of your site.

Regular content is imperative to the success of any blog. This content needs to be informative, accurate, and written in a way that will appeal to your visitors. Every blog demands different content and by producing the right content on a regular basis it will pay dividends.

In some posts you should try to find an opportunity to link to at least one page on your main website. Try not to get carried away by placing too many links or linking from all your posts but if you mention a particular product, link the name of that product to the corresponding page on your site. Alternatively include a paragraph at the bottom of the page that includes a link to a related resource (on your own page, or an affiliate link). If you are using a blog to make money through affiliate links then you should be careful to only use affiliate links in a relatively small proportion of your posts.

About This Author
Matt Jackson is a blog writer, website content copywriter, and a big fan of alliteration in article titles. Through his website, WebWiseWords, he offers a full blog writing and posting service for businesses of any size and industry.