With each passing month, there seems to be more and more content management systems and web platforms popping up on the Internet. They all seem to make big promises to offer top-of-the-line SEO while still being extremely easy to use. Unfortunately, they talk big and act small. Some of them are decent, but many of them are subpar. Most of the entrepreneurs and organizations that create these web platforms are trying to compete with WordPress, but in reality, they aren’t even coming close to offering a comparable solution. WordPress is simply too advanced and mature.
Optimized and Responsive Themes
One of the best things about WordPress is its themes. It is easier today to create a website than ever before. Even if you don’t have a professional working knowledge of web coding, you can create a website based from a theme template. Understand, of course, that it is much better to work with a professional website designer to polish your online presence, but themes are a huge help to novices and experts alike.
Furthermore, many themes have built-in options that cater to mobile users. But how does that affect your SEO strategy? Well, because mobile technologies have increased in popularity exponentially, Google has made updates to their algorithm to award mobile-friendly sites better mobile search rankings. Other web platforms that aren’t as advanced or developed as WordPress fail to offer adequate mobile tools. If you haven’t optimized your website for mobile users, you are missing out on boatloads of organic mobile traffic. Fortunately, an SEO professional can help you update your site to attract more mobile users.
Load Times
Google has also made it apparent that their search algorithm takes into account the amount of time it takes for your pages to load. Older content management platforms aren’t as fine-tuned as WordPress. In addition, older and hard-coded custom websites have the potential to take a long time to load. Though load time isn’t thought to be a heavily-weighted ranking signal, every little bit helps SEO. When you use WordPress, on the other hand, you can rest assured that your website won’t take forever to load. Caching plugins and other optimization tools can help your website run like a well-oiled machine.
Open Source Plugins
One of the biggest advantages to WordPress is the wealth of tools and plugins that users have access to – many times for free! Because WordPress supports open source development, coders have written extensive tools for just about any problem.
Of these tools, many position themselves as solutions to common SEO problems. Competitor’s platforms simply don’t offer near as many tools. Take the Rainmaker platform, for example. Though it attempts to provide comprehensive SEO tools, it falls woefully short of the tools available on WordPress.
Hit the Ground Running
WordPress also helps users by offering standard SEO tools on a fresh installation, thereby decreasing the amount of time it takes to optimize your content for SEO purposes. Arguably, a successful long term strategy would employ more tools than are found on a fresh installation of WordPress, but it is still a huge benefit for users to have SEO tools from day one. Also, you don’t have to be a coder to use these tools. While an SEO professional will be able to outperform you at every turn if you lack knowledge, experience, and advanced tools, having SEO tools from the beginning is a huge asset.
Link Management Tools
Back-links are a huge topic in the SEO world. In the not-so-distant past, back-links were weighted very heavily and people found a lot of ways to take advantage of them and exploit the Google algorithm. Today, it is not possible as it once was to boost SEO with spammy back-link profiles. If, for example, a low quality and spammy website links to your content, you can actually lose rankings. As such, it has become more important than ever to manage your links. There are a variety of plugins to help you do this that are not hard to use. If you don’t know what you are doing, though, you should consult with an SEO professional before disassociating yourself with a back-link to ensure that you aren’t harming your website’s SEO potential.
Conclusion
Instead of using an inferior web platform, consider using WordPress. If you are new to web development and aren’t sure how to go about designing a website, then you are probably best off seeking the help of a professional who specializes in WordPress websites. Other web platforms are too new, immature, and unproved. As such, they are inadequate for your business. You need to make sure your online presence is polished to a high sheen, and combined with its SEO potential, WordPress is the best option on the market to do this.