The more I use Wordpress, the more I love it. It has 2 very important
features that Blogger doesnt yet support.
Number 1, you can set up Wordpress to automatically ping all the RSS and blog
feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if
you want your blog to get a lot of traffic right away. On top of that, youll be
quickly developing backlinks to your blog almost automatically.
Think about how long it can take you to build a regular site, get the search
engines to index it, get backlinks to improve your listings, and then start
getting traffic. A blog like Wordpress can do all that "grunge" work for you
automatically.
Number 2, Wordpress allows the use of Categories. Categories are a very
powerful way to improve the structure of your site both for human visitors and
for the search engines.
Lets say the topic of your site is Widgets. You could create a Category for
black widgets, one for orange widgets, and one for green widgets.
Now when you add posts to your blog, you can choose which of your categories
your post belongs to. Now your blog will archive your past posts not only by
their month and date, as Blogger does. But also by Category.
So if you have a visitor who is especially interested in green widgets, they
can easily find all your posts on green widgets. They dont have to go through
your entire archives to find them. With a blog that has been around for awhile
and has hundreds of posts, that would be pretty discouraging. Using Categories
makes it very easy.
Categories are also very search engine friendly. When you use Categories in
your blog, there is a link on every one of your pages to your categories. Think
about this: would you rather be #1 in the search engines for March 2003, or for
green widgets, one of the main keywords of your site?
By using the Category feature, you will eventually have hundreds of pages on
your site with links to green widgets, black widgets, and orange widgets. All
those backlinks to those keywords can result in much higher search engine
rankings.
Another neat feature is that you can easily create an RSS feed for each of
your categories. Then every time you post to your blog, it could be pinging the
Blog/RSS directories for each feed!
Compare that to putting up a new page on a traditional website. Even if the
search engines find your new page right away, it might be a month or two before
it actually gets indexed and starts drawing traffic. It might be a long time
before it enjoys a first page position for its keywords.
Its almost amazing how easy all this is with a well-structured blog like
Wordpress with Categories enabled!
