Hi all, I'm looking at competing websites in many different types of niches which i'm interested, and I noticed that none of them run wordpress platforms. They all run they're own custom coded asp/php, etc. I want to compete but I love the wordpress platform. I know everyone will advise that it's all about SEO to rank high regardless of the coding, but it strikes me and makes me paranoid about going through with all of the hard work running the Wordpress platform, simply b/c NONE of the highly ranked sites are running the platform. What are your thoughts? Thanks
There are plenty of highly ranked sites that run WordPress. Check the Technorati top 100 blogs and you'll find loads of them. These are sites getting a torrent of organic traffic coming into them each and every month. Off the top of my head, the first one I would suggest you check out is Problogger.net WordPress can be a very powerful SEO tool, the key is how you do your on-page optimization. You should definitely research this subject. As you mentioned off page factors are more important then on page factors, but on-page is still significant. Your competitors are doing on-page optimization and you should to.
From my experience, wordpress is the easiest way to rank high - because all you need to do is press publish, and your rss feed gets pinged, google spiders your site and voila - you have visitors! It's good to get a kick-start with but of course it's only quality content that's going to bring visitors back - regardless of the platform you use.