I see so much talk about wordpress. I realize its very open and customizable. But what is it that makes it significantly better than other blogging software? Or is it not? Thanks
the point is that every noob can use it. And yes it is highly "seoable". The only problem wordpress has is having the same content on more pages. But the "not-noobs" can avoid that by building a decent theme. Unfortunately it are often the free themes which cause duplicated content. Because Wordpress is so easy many newbies are also using it for company websites. But if you are serious and you have a business /not blog. Then you are better of with Drupal which is a real content management system. And yoomla! can be customised to become SEF, but IMO joomla! is the past, its the old stuff.
I dont know why it is seo friendly but it just is. But my football (soccer) site in my sig is in 13th spot for the term football (in Aussie google) and I get a couple of hundred unique visits per day. I only started my site in Mid-march this year. But I have worked hard on building content (over 50 written news articles) I am well happy !
Thats very good "noobie2shoes" although i have no expertice in the football market i can safely say that the competition for that specific keyword must be high.
Besides the plugins(free), themes(mostly free), there is a strong growing powerful community of wordpress fans, developers, and bloggers. Jump in, join us! You will love Wordpress!
If it's a blog, static website or CMS it doesn't matter! Neither one has more value in search engines then the other. They can all be modified to provide the best on-page SEO needed, it all depends on the user itself.
Well for starters it tends to have a strong internal linking structure, pretty decent information architecture capabilities out of the box (though it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination), fairly good use of semantic markup (though many of the themes available actually get it so wrong that I was compelled to write my own Theme framework to fix those issues and truly optimize the markup), and with a few minor changes in the admin panel, can actually structure links properly. It does have some issues out of the box as well; these primarily deal with duplicate content problems which can be avoided by using the Top Level Cats or Category Base Killer plugin, utilizing a custom permalink structure that writes keyword rich URLs (yes, I'm referring to /%category%/%postname%/ here) and plugins to add rel="nofollow" to the blogroll (Blogroll Nofollow) as well as optimize the page titles and META tags (the All In One SEO Pack). There are other plugins you can use as well, to find them, check out my WordPress SEO Checklist.