Understanding WordPress' economical architecture

WordPress employs sound economical architecture to display pages reliably and quickly. In the early days of HTML, each display element on a web page was displayed through the use of markup tags such as<font face="verdana" color="green">This is some text!</font> to display a string of green text in the verdana font style. One of the inherent weaknesses of this approach was that it led to the incessant repetition of markup tags. WYSIWYG editors compounded the problem by tending towards excessive repetition of markup tags: a web page with 20 paragraphs might have 20 font declarations, one for each paragraph. Repeating markup code makes websites display more reliably, but it makes them far less efficient because they take longer to load and longer for the browser to process the markup.

There is another inherent problem. If you wanted to change the text on your website from green to black, you would have to edit each individual font color declaration throughout your site.

With the advent of CSS, the declarations for every element on a web page could be made either at the head of the page, or ideally in an off-page text file called a stylesheet. This answered the issue of both the uneconomical repetition of markup as well as giving webmasters the ability to change a single element sitewide by changing one declaration. With well-crafted CSS, pages display more quickly and hence rank better.

WordPress' internal architecture is entirely CSS-based. Unless the WordPress template is poorly coded, WordPress uses off-page CSS stylesheets to define elements. A WordPress page might display with 180 lines of code where the equivalent page created by a static WYSIWYG editor might display 350 lines of code. Pages load faster, so the search engines respond with good rankings and users enjoy a good experience while visiting your site.

WordPress' inherent economy doesn't end there. WordPress pages are generated quickly and neatly by a simple and quick processing engine. WordPress sites generate proper, valid HTML code that search engines love, although a poorly-crafted WordPress template can undermine code quality.

Building large sites quickly with WordPress

WordPress began its history as a blogging/publishing platform. Even as WordPress has matured into a capable content management platform, it has retained the features that make it adapt as a speedy and agile publishing tool. WordPress will enable you to create content more quickly than other platforms and certainly more quickly than with static HTML pages.

Search engine optimization relies upon content. The more content that appears on your site, the more opportunities you will have to rank for the wider families of keyword phrases. Also, each page of content on your website contributes to the whole. Remember, all indexed web pages generate PageRank. So, even a minor page on your website generates a small thimble of PageRank that contributes to the overall ranking power of your site.

Earning respect with search engines

WordPress enjoys both respect and familiarity for search engines. When a search engine encounters a website with unusual or non-standard navigation, the search engine must do its best to follow the navigation to the deepest files within a website's organizational structure. If the search spider cannot reliably and confidently follow a website's navigation to discover the deepest pages within a website, then those pages are unlikely to be indexed. Because of WordPress' reliability and familiarity to search engines, spidering errors almost never occur.

Because of the sheer number of installations worldwide, search engines crawl and index content on WordPress sites with ease. Faster and more thorough crawling and indexing means that more of your content will be placed in the search engine indexes.

WordPress also enjoys trust and respect with search engines. WordPress, for the most part, has been of only marginal use to spammers, although that appears to be changing. There are several plug-ins available for WordPress now that enable the wholesale importation of duplicated content from other websites (we don't recommend employing these tools, as the duplicate content doesn't rank well). As these plug-ins become more advanced, perhaps WordPress may begin to suffer from an unwelcome reputation as a platform for spammers.

Leveraging WordPress' blogging capabilities

This capability almost goes without saying, because blogging is the historically core purpose of WordPress. WordPress has retained many of the features of a pure blogging platform such as the presentation of articles in reverse chronological order as its default setting and built-in RSS feed capabilities. The great power of WordPress comes into effect when its inherent blogging capabilities are employed within a commercial site.

A sound and standard approach to a commercial site on the WordPress platform is to have the main services pages for a business published on the front page and in the Pages section of WordPress while educational articles, product updates, general blog posts, and commentary are published to the Posts section. The Posts section of WordPress is traditionally where blog posts appear. With this dual capability, a website owner can outpace competitors that aren't employing a blog.

Displaying RSS feeds

RSS feeds come standard with all WordPress installations. RSS stands for "really simple syndication" and refers to a family of formatting standards that allow for the timely publication of freshly-updated web content to other websites and devices. In a practical sense, the RSS feeds of your site can be utilized by users to follow your content in an RSS reader such as a Google Reader or the Bloglines without necessarily visiting your site. When a user "subscribes" to your RSS feed, they'll receive regular updates of all new content you generate. RSS represents another avenue by which users can remain engaged to you and your content.

You need to do anything to set up your WordPress feed it's already there. However, you may wish to take a few steps to ensure that users can find your feed. You do this by using a link, which, in common practice, is represented visually with the familiar orange RSS icon.

Promoting your RSS feed

Many webmasters make the mistake of not promoting their feed. The single best way to promote your feed is to make sure you have a clearly visible RSS icon with a link to your feed visible throughout your site. If the RSS feeds fit within your strategy, put your RSS icon prominently in the header or sidebar. You can also submit your RSS feed to special search blog-only search engines; we'll learn later how to submit your blog to blog engines.

Matt McGee's blog employs an oversized RSS icon. It seems to be working; he's got over 7000 readers of his blog via RSS.

Automatically creating descriptive URLs with WordPress permalinks

WordPress seamlessly and automatically handles the creation of URLs through its permalink feature. A permalink is simply WordPress' way of describing the URL for a particular page. Because keywords in the URL of a page are a ranking factor, if you want to rank for "WordPress Development," then this URL mysite.com/wordpress-development will perform better in search than mysite.com/index.php?page=5. WordPress' permalink functionality gives you the descriptive URL strings for search engines to follow with no effort at all.

First, you'll need to turn on permalinks within the WordPress dashboard permalinks are not activated in a default installation. To turn on permalinks, log in to the dashboard and follow the left side navigation to Settings then Permalinks. At the Permalink Settings page, in the section titled Common Settings, click on the radio button for Custom Structure, and enter /%postname%/. This permalink structure will automatically generate URLs from your Page and Post titles but you'll still be able to manually change them if necessary.

Because the titles of your Posts and Pages are relevant to the topic of your content, the permalinks based on your titles will be relevant as well.

With the adjusted permalink setting, The WordPress page editor will automatically construct a well-formatted permalink from your Page title; this feature aids in search rankings. The permalink can be customized if you desire a custom URL.

Creating reliable, text-based navigation

WordPress automatically generates simple, text-based navigation that works well for both users and search spiders. Site visitors employ your website's navigation to browse your site and find content. Search engines use your navigation in a similar way, with a twist. Search engines follow the links in your navigation to find and index your pages. In addition, search engines use the text in your navigational links to reliably determine the topic of the destination page. In other words, the text you use in your navigation is a search engine ranking factor.

Luckily, WordPress generates text-based navigation menus based on your Post and Page titles. WordPress accomplishes this automatically. For the most part, this is an effective approach to search optimization. There was some criticism for earlier versions of WordPress because the navigation menus that WordPress generated were difficult to customize they were truly automated in the sense that they were very difficult to adjust manually. For example, if you wrote a page with a 30-word title, WordPress would display the entire 30-word title in the navigation. For some users, the better approach would be to allow customization of the navigation entries.

In response to this limitation, a host of third-party plug-ins such as "Exclude Pages" and "My Page Order" emerged to give webmasters more control over menus. With the release of WordPress 3.0, a complete menu control area is now fully integrated into the dashboard. With WordPress 3.0 menus, you can now control the following:

There is one limitation with WordPress 3.0 menus. The full functionality is available for Pages, but not for Posts. However, there is a slightly clunky workaround. To make a post appear in the custom menu, grab the full URL of the post and enter it into your custom menu as a "custom link". That way, you can mix your Posts within your Page navigation as well as create custom text for the navigation links.

Engaging visitors with built-in collaboration, contribution, and community building

WordPress is ready-made for collaboration, contribution, and community building the "3 Cs" that can transform a stale, static website into a vibrant web-based community. Two key collaborative features, User Roles and the Commenting System, keep both new and returning visitors engaged with your websites.

When thinking about search optimization, it is tempting to focus only on the competitive grind of search ranking positions and not focus on user retention and user loyalty. A strong position in search results will certainly bring new customers, but always be thinking of ways to keep your visitors engaged to your website and hence to your products and services. A first-time user of your website is a visitor, but on their second visit, they become a customer.

WordPress incorporates several collaborative and community features that can help you engage your visitors, interact with your customers, and even procure free content.

Employing user roles to get your team involved

The first feature is User Roles. User Roles are simply the system by which you can approve new users and set their administrative level. Higher administrative levels mean that the users have more authority and power on the site. Here is a summary of the available User Roles in WordPress:

With User Roles, you can easily and safely open your website up to all the members of your organization. More writers mean more content. Collaborative websites grow larger quicker, with more interesting content.

Improving ranking with user comments

Here's where WordPress really starts to leave static websites in the dust: the commenting system. WordPress' commenting system is simply a feature that lets just about any visitor to your website leave comments (good or bad) about your Pages and Posts. You get the final say on whether a comment gets approved or deleted, and you can turn commenting on or off for individual Posts/Pages.

The commenting system brings your website's visitors into the dialog. You can learn a lot from the comments that users leave on your website. Some customers might point out a design flaw in one of your products, or pose a question that benefits all your visitors.

Page/Post comments are great for the SEO; your users are now generating content for you. When your users comment on a page, they create new content with almost no intervention from you except to click on the Approve button in the WordPress dashboard.

When the search engines visit your site, they'll find the new comments and index your new "content" the search engines have no idea if you wrote it or not, and they wouldn't care anyway. When a search engine discovers periodic fresh content on your website, your site now gets treated differently. As a site with regular new content, you get more visits from search spiders, faster indexing, and higher ranking.

An extreme example of faster indexing through the creation of fresh content is Craigslist. Craigslist is the ultimate content site: millions of new, original pages are created each week. Google knows that Craigslist is constantly updated by its users, so they send multiple search spiders to Craigslist to constantly index this flood of new content. That's why while ordinary websites might wait 12 days for a new page to be indexed by Google, a new page on Craigslist might show up in the Google index in 15 minutes.

Commenting is a powerful device that you should keep implemented on all your Posts. Commenting on Pages doesn't always work as well because Pages have a different character (your Home page, your Contact Us page sometimes commenting on such pages isn't a fit). If you do turn commenting on, be prepared to moderate some spam comments.

WordPress' commenting system at work makes good pages into great pages: a popular blog post about our favorite website-design-galleries-generated user comments with suggestions for additions to the list. We periodically add suggestions from the comments to the Post itself. It's a win-win scenario; the Post gets free content from our visitors, and the visitors feel engaged and empowered.

Using update services

The final element that WordPress contributes to your SEO efforts is the Update Services. Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you've updated your website. WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you have published new content on your site by sending an XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a Page or Post. Then, the Update Services process your ping and index your new content. Users on sites like Technorati or Weblogs can discover your new content. This means more traffic for your site.

WordPress is set up by default to ping only Ping-O-Matic's server at rpc.pingomatic.com, but you can manually add other ping services.