MarketingProfs

Any web site can benefit from running on a blog platform such as WordPress, just from the SEO (search engine optimization) benefits alone…

…which include:

• tag clouds which provide keyword-rich text link navigation (when using Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin)
• RSS feeds, which really help with link building and garner you visibility in the feed search engines like Feedster
• visibility in blog search engines like Google Blog Search, Technorati, Sphere, etc.
• visibility on Technorati tag pages which delivers you Google visitors too, since Technorati tag pages tend to rank really well in Google
• rewritten URLs that are spider-friendly and tend to be indexed and ranked better in search engines
• content-rich, search engine friendly HTML, due to the presentation layer (usually) being cleanly separated from the content layer, along with semantic mark-up, which gives the search engines good clues as to what copy is important and what is not

I used my own company’s website, Netconcepts.com, as a test case, relaunching the site in August with WordPress as the CMS (content management system). We successfully transformed a corporate website from brochureware to Web 2.0-ware. Despite this, I doubt the average web visitor would even know our site had an underlying blog engine just by looking at it. I wrote up a case study detailing the process and the results. The results speak for themselves: the accompanying traffic graphs in the case study show the major ramp up in traffic from August through October, in comparison to the flat traffic trend for the first 7 months of the year.

After this initial success with WordPress for non-blogs, we then moved to using clients as guinea pigs. We just launched a WordPress-powered microsite for Countrywide called Credit Demystified that educates consumers about credit. We managed to figure out a way to apply tagging to static pages and not just posts, which to my knowledge hadn’t ever been accomplished before with WordPress (here is the WordPress hack on how to do this, by the way).

Last week I spoke with friend and colleague (and fellow MarketingProfs virtual seminar presenter) Alan Rimm-Kaufman. He told me of his company’s plans to switch their company’s site to WordPress. I asked him for his reasons. They were so good I asked him to blog them, which he just did. In summary, Alan says WordPress allows for:

• ease of editing (no HTML skills needed)
• easy handling of “rolling events” like speaking engagements
• post-dating of articles so they can automatically “go live” on the scheduled date (as is required with embargoed articles until their print publication date)
• reader participation through comments / trackbacks
• organization of the content using tags
• seamless support of all former URLs
• addition of new functionality (through plugins and through edits to the “open source” code)
• free support by the very responsive developer and user communities

So, given all that, you might want to consider running WordPress on your company’s website, regardless of whether you ever envisioned having a blog or not!