WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the world, with over a quarter of all sites on the internet built on the platform. While its popularity may present many issues, such as security, it does make implementing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) requirements incredibly straight forward. There are other CMS options available, such as Joomla or Drupal, but WordPress stands head and shoulders above in my opinion. The real reason for its popularity is that it’s completely open source; anyone can access the code and create a new theme or plugin. Here are some of the features that make it the best platform on which to implement SEO:
1. Plugins
The installation of plugins allows for the customisation of almost any element of the site. Almost every SEO practitioner will swear by the Yoast SEO plugin, which allows us to optimise very technical elements like Robots.txt file, canonicalisation issues, XML sitemap and all the other elements that someone with no development skills could understand
2. Permalinks
This inbuilt feature allows you to easily change the naming structure of your URLs to include keywords and make them SEO friendly
3. Mobile optimisation
We live in a ‘mobile first’ world, and there are various free WordPress templates that are fully responsive. All you have to do is unpack your theme and it complies with Google’s mobile standards. The importance and ease of this should not be understated
4. Site speed
Google has been on a mission to decrease the loading speed of websites in recent times, so using an off-the-shelf solution like WordPress is going to put you in their good graces, as most of their themes load quickly and efficiently, compared to counterpart CMS options. Adding features can slow this down somewhat, but there are plenty of caching plugins to help restore faster load times.
5. Content editing
All the necessary elements of content optimisation are included as part of the ‘what you see is what you get’ text editor, meaning anyone who can use word processing software can write and push live web content, without necessarily knowing HTML code.
All Response Media Viewpoint
WordPress is without a doubt the CMS of choice for most designers, developers and SEOs. The ease of installation, the huge online community, and the number of plugins suggest that it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. From an SEO perspective, it is a dream to work with; the countless plugins mean any technical SEO or content problem can easily be resolved
