WordPress is by far a superior platform for online marketing and it can help you overcome a variety of your Internet marketing challenges by automating your tasks, freeing up your time, and most importantly, helping you rank on the search engines.

WordPress is the best framework available for SEO for a number of reasons:

• Everyone Loves WordPress!
  WordPress is such a popular and ubiquitously accepted platform that just about every company involved in the SEO world have developed an SEO plugin, theme, or something that will work with WordPress. Also most organizations that don’t have something to do with WordPress intend to down the road. So just the fact that organizations such as SEO Scribe, a SEO content provider, Google, & many others integrate directory with WordPress makes it an ideal choice to minimize the amount of work it takes to keep your site ranking.
• Ease of Use
  Traditionally your SEO provides recommendations for your website and then they are handed off to your web designer to conduct updates. WordPress gives you the ability to make those changes yourself, cutting the extra expense in half. It takes all but 20 minutes to login and update a few items versus waiting a few days for someone else to do it. And even if you don’t have time and would like someone else to update your website, the amount of time it takes is so much less that the 3 hours you would have been charged prior to using WordPress for SEO has now become less than an hour.
• SEO Automation
  WordPress does a tremendous job of automating the Search Engine Optimization tasks for a website project. It reduces the amount of manual coding a professional SEO or web designer would have to do and lets them concentrate on the more important elements of SEO like writing quality content, title tags, anchor text, latent semantic indexing (LSI), meta descriptions, & related posts. These are all methods WordPress has made very easy, even automated, so after initial set up the average person can generally keep up with the day-to-day SEO tasks that allow the Search Engines to clearly be aware of your content and what it is all about.
• SEO Plugins
  Plug-ins are additions to WordPress that add very useful and effective SEO features to your blog with out having to write any code or know about writing code. There are a number of excellent open source (free) plugins available for WordPress that can be added with a few clicks of the mouse. As a matter of fact I believe the most important aspect of WordPress is the ability to use plugins for SEO. There are lots of plugins that essentially do the same thing but after years of using all of them we have a standard group of plugins that we implement on all our WordPress websites.

Here is our recommended list of SEO plugins for WordPress:

• All-In-One-SEO Pack Pro – A very strong SEO plugin that just about works out of the box with no customization although with a few tweeks here and there you can get it exactly the way you want it. The free version works well too but the Pro version removes all the ads from the admin section and contributes back to the developer who has put a tremendous amount of work into it.
• Smart 404 – A complex but simple to implement plugin that handles all HTTP errors your website has from time to time. The most common type of error is when a page cannot be found, due to a bad link, mistyped URL, etc.. So this plugin uses some AJAX code, Google Search API’S, and a few tricks to display a very helpful and Search-Engine Optimized Error Page. The default displays Google Search Results for images, news, blogs, videos, web, custom search engine, and your own site. It also searches for part of the requested filename that was not found, but it attaches your domain to the search for SEO and greater results.
• cbnet Ping Optimizer – Helps your website notify all the ping services available. This encourages search engines to index your website and I’ve always seen improvement in traffic after I install this. It also, more importantly, keeps your website from unnecessary pinging which can get your site listed as a spammer. Must have. Just be sure to use a fresh list of pinging sites in it like this one.
• Google XML Sitemaps – An absolute must if you want the search engines to accurately index your website. Again this one works pretty much out of the box but adjusting a couple of settings like adding a Yahoo Application ID and enablling Categories to be indexed are a couple of tweeks to consider. I work under the philosophy that using categories to index your site is much better than tags. So make sure to let the search engine bots find your categories and noindex your tags.
• SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.
• SEO Slugs – Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve SEO.
• SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
• Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Tool – Improves your blog’s search engine optimization by “noindexing” pages you choose.
• WP-Auto Add Tags – As you publish or edit a post, the plugin gathers and sets the tags suitable for your post based, on your content. (Used in combonation with WP-Auto Trackback Sender
• WP-Auto Trackback Sender – Sends trackbacks towards similar blog posts based on your post tags/categories. If you edit the post, the plugin will send trackbacks only using the new defined tags/categories. You can also set the plugin to look for specific post language.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is by far the most important aspect of any long term WordPress website marketing strategy. From making sure your title tags are properly named to improving the load performance of your website (500ms improvement in load time yields up to 20% improvement in time on site and conversions), optimizing your website with WordPress and search engine optimization is at the core of appearing on Google and the other search engines when a potential client searches for something relevant to your business.