Does WordPress Help SEO?

Importance Of WordPress For SEO

There is a general belief that WordPress as a content management system (CMS) is good for SEO – that somehow it automatically gives a bit of a boost compared to using anything else. Some people believe this strongly, while others disagree and claim that WordPress is no different than any other normal CMS. So what’s the truth? Does WordPress help SEO or is that the equivalent of an online wives’ tale?

Read on to find out so you can make an educated decision based on facts and not rumor!

The Story In Question

The general story goes that WordPress helps out with SEO. While this is a great sales pitch for getting someone to go with WordPress over another content management system, it’s not a completely true story. There are many ways that this CMS can help individuals by setting up the perfect canvas for them to create an awesome SEO campaign, but there’s nothing about WP that automatically gives you a boost in the search engine rankings.

So as a straight up ranking point on the famed “200 point checklist,” this is a myth. But there are still good reasons to consider using WP.

So How Does WordPress Encourage Good SEO Practices?

The truth is that while WordPress doesn’t improve SEO by itself, this is a CMS that is setup to help encourage good on-site SEO practices. You can trust good coding that doesn’t penalize you or hide malware, in addition to a consistent backend system that allows you to use the same tools regardless of the theme that is being used.

With WP it is easy to find plug-ins or tutorials that help with:

• Creating an XML sitemap to encourage search engines to crawl your site
• SEO plug-ins for easy tagging, keywords, and on page programming
• Customized URLs that follow current best practice standards
• Easy multi-media formatting for exceptional content quality

What To Focus On

The key with WordPress, as with any particular management system for your blog or website, is using that framework to make all the manual changes and work you need in order to make your site search engine friendly. Plug-ins like Yoast SEO, Google XML Sitemap, and Akismet keep away spam, create a clear picture for search engines to check out, and allow you to optimize tags and meta descriptions as you see fit to get the perfect setup for your website.

There’s nothing about the programming in a WP theme that automatically makes it rank better, however the design of the site and ability to add these plugins creates a basic foundation where it becomes very easy to put good SEO practices into place without having to worry about the coding or muddling around and struggling to put certain factors into place.

In Conclusion

There are so many different ways to go about improving your overall SEO practices and while there are many great reasons to like WordPress, an SEO boost is not one of them. That being said, if you like things to be as simple as possible, there’s no denying that WP allows you to really get the look you want and simplify your overall look to create an ideal setting for more on-site SEO work in the future.