To wordpress or not to wordpress?

[Chalkie]

Never been a great wordpress fan until this year and am ppobably a bit of a novice with it i guess.

Now it may be me not doing it correctly, however, why is it i can build a site in html from scratch and get good stable ranking and pr within 6 months yet cannot get a decent ranking let alone any pr with a wordpress site?

Is wordpress not given its full due by the likes of G because is it a standard anyone can do it bit of kit or is it me?

[Peter Willis]

It's just you

There are any number of examples of Wordpress sites that rank well. It's all about what you do with Wordpress - hell, you can be running Wordpress and completely remove any indication that you are indeed using Wordpress if you know how.

I'd recommend firstly setting up your sites so they are SE friendly (i.e. enable the All In One SEO plugin feature that prevents Google crawling and indexing duplicate content which Wordpress [set up depending] will no doubt be putting on your site).

[Chalkie]

I do use all in 1 seo, perhaps i am not setting it right maybe.

[jarvi]

Paul, definitely take the time to understand all the setting for the SEO plugin. I have been a convert for a couple of years now and love the ease with which I can set things up. Each new site I learn something extra.

For some of mine the rankings aren't as important, however, no sooner than I click the save post button, I get a Google alert that the page has been indexed.

Was only thinking yesterday that we should start a thread about useful WordPress plugins. I think Casino Jack mentioned some in a thread a while back. I have a stand half dozen that I seem to use on every site.

[Chalkie]

Thanks James.

I would be interested in knowing what everyone sets seo pack too as a general rule of thumb along with what other plugins people consider to be a must on any wordpress site.

Have just found and started using a google sitemap plugin now and hoping that this may be the key to my failure so far.

[Ixian]

Have you changed the Wordpress Permalink structure to reflect your page title?

[Chalkie]

Yes, i use the following in permalinks:

/%postname%/%post_id%

Good or bad?

[GamTrak]

Hi Paul,

I would suggest that you use the following custom settings [/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/] The searching will be faster as well as other benifits.

If you need help with wordpress then just let me know.

Yes, i use the following in permalinks:

/%postname%/%post_id%

Good or bad?

[Chalkie]

Thanks Robin, will do!

[LiveCasinoPartners]

I use /%category%/%postname%.html as a permalink structure. I make sure the title is not to redundant with the category.
I love wordpress now. Not for a blog, but for a content management system. i am actually converting some sites from hard coded php/html/asp into a wordpress managed site.

We have some new webmasters who are using wordpress and members of our program doing great. I do recommend it for programmers and noobs a like.

[TrishOZ]

I agree. Wordpress is a great CRM tool, it's pretty easy to pick up and just use which is one of the reasons why I think it's been so successful.

[onlinegamblingeu]

As an example of a premium built wordpress site, we use wordpress exclusively at http://www.onlinegambling.eu.

It is customised to our specific needs.

Some plugins that I personally vouch for and use when building our sites:

HeadSpace2

This plugin pretty much does it all. The feature set is impressive and it allows you to hide most of the cryptic stuff away from your content writers/editors. This means they get busy working on your pages, you get busy picking your keywords. Also allows you to add analytics tracking code and many other powerful services to your site easily.
I think you could almost get by with this one alone.

cforms

The best contact form manager.. lets you drop in contact forms wherever you want. Highly customizable and can be converted easily to track leads or even integrate with salesforce if you ran that sort of business.

Google XML Sitemaps

Builds our sitemap xml to submit to your webmaster account automagically.

Permalink Redirect

This strips all the nasty php code from urls (?p=1&d=v) which can just hurt you in the long run.

RSS Footer

This lets you add a custom link or message to the end of every news item in your rss feed. Anyone who steals your content then does so by paying you back with a link.

Advertising Manager

If you are running affiliate banner campaigns across your site, this little puppy lets you drop them in anywhere on your site. Either via your widget panel or you can start slicing them into content with simple html/hashtags.
If an advertiser rips you off, go replace their ad _ONCE_ in the manager and don't worry about changing every page.
Plenty of other cool stuff you can do with this, it supports adsense, openx or regular html banners.

Redirection

This tracks permalink changes and adds 301 redirections to old pages. This means you never lose any link love by changing a title. You can also create your own 301 redirects without touching code.

WP Super Cache

A simple caching system.


On the topic of themes, if you haven't got the resources to build something yourself then I would highly reccomend themeforest. They have spectacular themes at pretty low prices and with a little bit of photoshop work you can have a premium looking gambling site up in no time.

I can recommend a lot more plugins, themes and tips/hacks. If there is sufficient interest I will do a proper post in a new thread discussing it in more detail.

If any of this helps you building your site, feel free to throw me a link back

[PokerLeads]

I believe Matt Cuts uses WP for his site. Can't be too bad if the pro uses it right?

[Ixian]

I believe Matt Cuts uses WP for his site. Can't be too bad if the pro uses it right?

Okay so now we know why Wordpress gets Google indexed so quickly.

[matted]

Chalkie - just do it.

Wordpress is one of the best free software platforms I've ever worked with. It has so many features and is completely customizable either by many many plugins or custom coding. Even custom themes (theme = site design) are not a problem...

[patmcluk]

Hi, i use Wordpress for my sites, and i have the google sitemap. I have a pretty high ranking for JustArsenal anyway, but thought i may as well download this All-in-one afte reading this post. My titles are set up for title and number, (as the number is needed for google news and every post is already indexed).

When i went into the admin page for all-in-one and read "this will change your post titles" i panicked and deactivated it!
Will it literally change ALL my titles, even retrospectively? And will it still include my post title and number if i activate it?

I had decided to upload to a less important site first to see what he effects were, but if someone can advise me here i would be grateful!

[patmcluk]

Hey i want to bump this thread back up because i was hoping to get lots more Wordpress tips. Come on people there must be hundreds of people with WP sites!

I think the Headspace mentioned above is good, and i also use the plug-in NoDoFollow for checking comment links, but surely there must be 1000s of other useful ones?

[bbonline]

I believe Matt Cuts uses WP for his site. Can't be too bad if the pro uses it right?

Maybe. haha

Akismets, working good in terms of wordpress widgets. Imagine certain commenter flooding up your blog, and yet akismets look beyond it with its auto generated spam checker to eliminate certain post that contributes less.

That's why I don't like blogger that much as if Google manipulate its PR.

[Simmo!]

Wordpress is excellent, although not a great fan of the admin layout in the new version as it isn't easy to work with on a Netbook (screen res issues). That aside, I use WP on several sites with lots of the plugins listed above. Headspace is tops.

From an SEO perspective, my advice would be only use WP if you intend regularly updating it. Google seems to respond well to WP if the content is regularly maintained and added to. If you leave it for any length of times, rankings tend to start dropping more quickly than on a standard site in my experience. But then one would expect Google to treat blogs in that way.

Cheers

Simmo!

[Chalkie]

I have to say that with all said and done, although i am not getting the best results with WP as i have done with bespoke sites, i do like it and expect to move most sites over to it as time evolves. Mind you i have managed to get No1 spot for a relatively well known poker room in europe, with a site dedicated to the poker room in question. Now to get top, infront of the actual room is something i had never achieved without WP.

It does worry me at times, however, as there are most certainly things that i leave as std or things i dont implement that are probably really important to implement. This is uppose will be corrected in time, however, it annoys me to think that i am not doing everything perfet already.

Trackbacks and pings for instance, cannot get my head round them properly.

I have added headspace on one site but it dont seem to work as i expect and have needed to use all in one seo in conjunction to get the meta as i want it.

I would tend to agree that a generally static site without updates on a regular basis would seem to lose strength with google and the like.

Will be doing much more testing of all my WP sites and surely with a lot of help here and a bit of perseverance will get it spot on eventually.