Hi I'm being forced to put wordpress on another server or not have it at all. Will wordpress work just as well for SEO if the domain name has to be: www.blog.mydomain-name.com i.e. if I have to put it on a subdomain Failing my being able to use wordpress - can anyone suggest a good .Net blog please? Thanks for the help
I have never understood why people add www in front of subdomains... It makes the URL that much harder to remember, more to type, adds no value, and looks... well... unappealing. blog.example.com is SOOOOOO much more appealing aestetically than www.blog.example.com IMO. If your blog is currently on your main domain at something like www.example.com/blog/ and you need to move it off of that server to a subdomain I would suggest something like blog.example.com WITHOUT the www. There are pros and cons for both approaches - having it as a subdomain vs having it as a directory on your main domain. But neither has huge advantages over the other so I wouldn't worry too much about switching as long as you 301 redirect ALL of your old pages to their new URLs. If you're hosted on an Apache webserver and your blog keeps the exact same structure, you can 301 redirect the entire blog easily with a few lines in the .htaccess file in the root of your main domain's web: Pros and Cons: For example, having it as a directory generally makes it easier to interlink if you generate navigation and breadcrumb structures automatically by looking for parent and child pages using a CMS. If it's a seperate subdomain, you'll have to hard code the generation of links to your blog. But on the otherhand, if it's a subdirectory then it's part of the main domain and as such can take advantage of the main doamin's trust and authority. Having it as a subdomain, as I mentioned above does have the disadvantage of making it so you can't automatically render a Blog link in the main domain's global nav like you could if it were part of the main site and that site uses a CMS. However, having it as a subdomain DOES have a major advantage of allowing you to get more real estate in the SERPs. Typically Google will only show 1 or 2 listings for a given domain on page 1. Because the subdomain is seen as a separate site, should both the subdomain and the main domain both rank on page 1 for a given keyword phrase, you could get 1-2 listings for your main domain PLUS another 1-2 listings for your subdomain. So you "could" potentially get 4 SERP listings... It's rare though that this happens... This typicallly happens mainly when someone is searching for your domain name. But it IS possible even w/ other keyword phrases assuming they are both targetting some common phrases.
Leave off the 'www' bit as the 'blog' bit takes the place of it. To include both is incorrect and many search engine spiders won't follow such links or index such urls.
In my opinion Wordpress works just as well, (and actually better) in a subfolder, and the advantage of this is that you can build a static site above on the root/ and totally explode your ranking potential because * you can leverage the ranking potential and the content of the static site above, you can get indented listings showing one static page and one blog post, so the potential for longtail hits is in simple terms more or less multiplied by the amount of static pages above the blog. * you can manage your linkjuice with more precise control than having it all hit the front page of the blog and necessarily distributed through the multiple links to content we want to have showing there. Even if you don’t have or have any plans for a static site at this point, just put up an optimized holding/splash page and put your blog on site.com/blog/ (or /news/ , /yacht-news - or whatever) you will thank us for this further down the line. It is not essential, Wordpress on the main domain will also work very well, but we would bet that we would do better than a comparable site, with our blog on a subfolder and a static site above. Later on, when you add pages to the static site, keep the architecture flat, and make sure all the pages link to each other using [ ..it is time to introduce the first acronym TAT - Target Anchor Text ] which should be the same thing as the first 1 - 3 words of that page’s title, and link to the blog domain. My blog ranks for “Blog HQ†on the strength of these links from the site above alone >>Try search<< If you are not putting the blog one folder level down from the root, and you have competitive words in mind as your ultimate targets, then seriously consider putting at least a Wordpress static page on the front, and run the blog on another internal page. Back to the blog. Did you read and act on Joost’s Wordpress SEO guide? or SEO Design Solutions Wordpress SEO tips ? hopefully you have, and that’s the tech stuff covered.
Thanks for all the replies. Has anyone carried out research into how wordpress competes with other blogs? Everyone says that wordpress performs really well for SEO but has it been tested? Thanks
How WordPress performs from an SEO perspective depends on which theme, widgets, & plugins you use. Since themes and widgets render the HTML from WordPress' CMS DB, if the HTML they generate is not SEO friendly then WordPress would suck just like any other blogging software might. The great thing about WordPress is that it has a HUGE development community where lots of SEO friendly themes have been developed for it like Thesis and lots of good SEO plugins have also been developed.
Wordpress is really performed very well due to its simple and user friendly easy navigation and also there are very good SEO plugins available for it.