Frequently Asked Questions
WordPress…What is that?
WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tools available. But what many people don’t know is that it is a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that can be used for more than just blogging. With WordPress, you can build a blog, a website, or both. WordPress tends to be a good choice for small business websites because it provides easy-to-use tools to manage and update content while optimizing user visibility.
Why is WordPress the right choice for my site?
There are many reasons why to use WordPress. Here a the top 5!
1. Easy of use –
The WordPress user interface is simple and user-friendly. To edit content on a page, simply click “Pages”, then click the title of your page. Make your changes using a similar interface as a Word document and click “Update”. Everything just makes sense. Need to add a blog post or news item? Click “Add New” under “Posts”, create your post and click “Publish”.
The ability to manage your website pages as well as your blog in the same admin will save time and keep everything centralized. It is also easy to change SEO settings such as page titles and descriptions without having to get into the code of the site. For a business owner, there is no better system to manage your online presence.
2. Integration with 3rd parties –
Because of WordPress’s popularity and large user base, outside service providers love to integrate closely with WordPress. Most integration comes in the form of plugins, which are like apps for your website. Plugins are installed on your website and include a huge variety of functionality including adding social networking features, event management, member-protected pages, SEO enhancements, text-resizers, email marketing and countless others.
If you need special functionality for your site, there is most likely a plugin for it. For example, last week Facebook announced WordPress integration (in the form of a plugin) that allows your posts to be published to Facebook when you publish to your blog as well as adding activity feeds and send/like/subscribe buttons to your site. You will not find another CMS that integrates so tightly with Facebook.
3. SEO –
As a business owner, your number one priority is to get visitors to your website so they can learn about what you do and eventually become customers. WordPress gives you a great base to improve your SEO and get ranked for the keywords your customers are searching. SEO is made easy with WordPress because of a few factors:
Awesome SEO plugins that make it easy to create the right settings for your on-page SEO. Easily edit page titles and descriptions, add XML sitemaps to help Google index your site and change permalinks (URLs) to include keywords you are trying to target. All of these things are easy for business owners to do themselves.
-> Ability to easily add content to your site to keep it active and up-to-date. Google loves websites with original content that is added on a regular basis. This post is an example of doing just that.
->WordPress outputs clean code that Google loves. This makes it easy for Google to see your content and not a huge amount of code that is needed to display that content.
->Easily shareable content. With social sharing buttons and new Facebook integration, it is easy for people reading your blog to share your content with their network. This is the best way to build links to your site.
Instead of hiring an SEO consultant for hundreds of dollars a month, I can do your own SEO by optimizing your on-page settings, adding the right metadata and guiding you to publishing valuable content that people will share. This is the most natural and effective way to build links back to your site, which is ~70% of what goes into your Google ranking.
4. Blogging –
There is no better platform to be blogging on. When WordPress was first launched in May 2003 it was built off of a purely blogging platform. Since then, it has morphed into a full-fledged content management system. At its core, WordPress is built to be a great way to manage and publish your business blog. Tools (plugins), easy management of posts and categories and its user-friendly interface all come together to make it easy for you to publish content on your own, which is the best thing you can do to improve your online presence. If you are a business and you are not blogging, think again. Blogging is the most natural way to gain visitors and keep your site updated.