Everyone is talking about WordPress and SEO today-

Chris Pearson’s twitter stream-
@Skitzzo There are TOOLS that you can use with WordPress to make your SITE more SEO friendly 😉
@Skitzzo It’s a common misconception—”WordPress is good for SEO”—and it’s wholly false. How can I not comment? 😀 about 15 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to Skitzzo
@Skitzzo There’s no such thing as WordPress SEO. ALL content is served to SEs via themes, so themes have 100% of the control.

WpBlogger – “The Truth about SEO” and Leland at ThemeLab.com What Makes a “SEO-Friendly” WordPress Theme?

So I want to give my opinion– I love WordPress and I think it “CAN” be a good tool for SEO, but it really is no good unless it is completely optimized and set up properly. If you don’t know what needs to be done on WordPress to make it work well you are just going to have another WordPress site. There is more than just a theme and some SEO.

I see the bad results all the time. People think they know WordPress and they think the know SEO and the sell “Optimized WordPress Sites”, but they don’t have a clue. In my opinion these “Optimized WordPress Sites” are turning into yet another nightmare that will hurt the name of WordPress. Making WordPress work they way I want takes effort, time and constant education.

Why We Recommend WordPress

It is affordable for small business owners and many of them have been screwed over by web designers that gave them crappy sites that the search engines hated and they had no CMS. With WordPress they can edit content and have some control.

WE can set WordPress up the right way and optimize it for them and if they choose to hire someone else to handle SEO down they line they have that freedom (we haven’t had that issue yet, but the option is there for them).

They can use their blog for marketing and social media and we can train them how to do that. In today’s economy businesses want as many options as they can get at an affordable price. We provide that and we provide results they love. It is a win-win.

Themes and Design – Easily Screwed Up.

You can buy a great WordPress theme with good mechanics, but if you have a bad designer create a unique look for the template they can totally screw up all the good that came with the template. Matt Cutts said last year, “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” BUT I don’t think people took that comment as it was meant. No matter which coding option you choose you for a website you can either make it work or screw it up with bad coding (or a lack of knowledge).

Here is a comment from my web designer via IM this morning over this topic:

I have just tried to make the technical point that it should never be said that “wordpress is good for seo” and other technical experts agree with me, because it is not a valid statement.
Is it (wordpress) the most affordable choice, yes, it is the easiest for the novice to set up, yes, but if you said in a meeting WordPress was the best for SEO, I would stand up after you and refute that point by point. (FYI – I would expect her to)

WordPress and SEO are not just an automatic thing, it doesn’t work that way, but people are under the assumption that it is. In the web world any traditional made site or WordPress site can be great or suck. It is only as good as a your SEO and your coder.

Melissa – SEO Aware