I always hear how search engines love blogs. So let's say I'm making a "how to" website with about 12 articles on it, I would have the 12 articles be 12 "blog posts". Would it be smart to use wordpress for this even though I'm not making a traditional blog, in order to gain an advantage in the SERPs?
I believe the more posts you have the better off you are. With my blog most of the traffic from search engines have come from very specific some times long sentances for key phrases. It's because I talk about a lot of different things. Can you do more than the 12 posts? If not, you might as well just have a regular site.
There are definate advantages of using wordpress over designing a simple CMS. 1) It's easier. 2) Wordpress features and automated ping service. 3) Wordpress is fairly well optimized out of the box. 4) You have the option to receive comments on your content without having to install a script or design your own. 5) Wordpress is easy to customize.
Well the content is about 100 pages long, with 12 sections. So there would be lots of content, just nothing new to add.
For myself, I am using Nucleus CMS for my website which I run more as a portal than a blog. My articles are more but they are much shorter. Will using Nucleus affect my SEO? Or is Wordpress a better choice?
forumpopulator, u can use wordpress for that, with static pages. it will be very easy, but i don't think it'll give u a big seo advantage. u need to seo optimize the template u r using and the big seo advantages of wordpress blogs come with regular posts, not with "static blogs". anyway u can't go wrong with wordpress ;-)
For a site with 12, 20 or even more static pages I would never use a database based system. If you have a static site which rarely get updated, I would use static pages php/html pages.
Make them as different PAGES and make ONE blog post which mentions them all. Then make sure the pages are linked to in the footer and sidebar etc. By posting them as blog posts (within a small time frame) there's a good chance BOTs will not pick up the entries and therefore they won't be indexed.
Well if you want to get SERP then the only best method is to blog on blogger because google gives some more weightage to blogger I have seen and you get indexed within about 24 hours only!!