Matt Cutts from Google on WordPress Development and SEO

When building a website, you may be curious as to what platform to use. What works best? What does Google prefer? According to Matt Cutts from Google, they actually prefer WordPress development because it’s easy to use and provides clean design that is super easy for Google to crawl. This means your site is more likely to be indexed, which means it’ll be easier for people to find you using a search engine. For this very reason, WordPress design is perfect for those wanting to have a website that ranks high in the search engines without having to invest a ton of time.

That’s the key here: WordPress is like one massive shortcut for SEO implementation. You don’t need to get bogged down in the details. You don’t need to be an expert. What you do need, however, is to know how to use the tools you have at your disposal and the impact they will have on your site’s reputation.

When working in WordPress development, you should know that plugins are extremely useful. Plugins save you a ton of time. If you had to manually create pages, link them, and add SEO tactics to each, you’d have no hours left in the day to create compelling content–which is the whole point for having a site in the first place. Matt Cutts recommends a few plugins in particular as being especially helpful like Cookies for Comments, Feedburner, Enforce WWW, and WP Super Cache. All of these streamline site management and provide for a more pleasant end-user experience.

Another thing you need to think about is your choice of keywords. Whether you’re embarking on WordPress design on your own or using pre-existing Themes, one thing remains constant: your content needs to be of high quality. That being said, you obviously want to keyword optimize it at least to some degree. Of course, the days of keyword stuffing have long since passed. Still, you want to include phrases that people commonly search for when looking for your product, service, or topic. Stay away from jargon or difficult terms that people outside of your industry wouldn’t be familiar with. This is key for successful WordPress development. You need to be accessible in every way. It may sound obvious, but you’d be amazed by how many people build websites about a topic that lack keywords having to do with that specific topics.

When contemplating WordPress design, you need to take advantage of every opportunity you have to optimize your content. For instance, when writing a new blog post, you have the option to customize the URL for the post. Don’t just leave it as a bunch of number. Include keywords from the title in the URL and don’t be afraid to throw in a keyword variant or two to catch further search engine attention. Matt Cutts assures users that this isn’t spam. It’s just being smart about your optimization. Make your content easy for people to find. It’s that simple.

Other tips involve adding h2 and h3 tags, emphasizing one main keyword, using dashes between keywords rather than underscores, and including internal site linking. As with any of these WordPress design tips, don’t abuse them.

When focusing on your WordPress design it’s important not to get so caught up in how you rank that you forget to develop interesting and compelling content. Spend at least as much time on writing and having something interesting to say as you do on WordPress development. You’ll set yourself apart from everyone else who are likely just regurgitating the same content over and over again. Differentiate yourself and the visitors will follow.