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HTML or Wordpress best for SEO?

by Sente
28 replies
  • SEO
    • |
If I dumped the same content into a html site or a WP site, which would rank better in Google?
#html #seo #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author JamesRad
    Depends on the use of the content but Wordpress with associated plugins does a very good job at dealing with the Onsite SEO and prepares your site very well for Google.

    For newbies Wordpress is a lot easier with its WYSIWYG editor and range of plugins to optimise the site.
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Jones
    Wordpress is awesome! It really is a great platform for nearly any kind of website.
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    • Profile picture of the author The Expert
      I'd guess that if you fired up a new site and dumped an article into it that is keyword focused, then it would probably do better on Wordpress.

      I mean...once you plug it in there and add a few tags and categories you actually created a number of different pages (category pages, tag pages, archive pages...etc) but on a static site you've just got one page.

      Also, Wordpress comes out of the box with an RSS feed which your stripped down hand-coded site does not.
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  • Profile picture of the author TristanPerry
    WordPress produces HTML.

    WP is best for newbies in some respects, but WordPress generates HTML (i.e. a WordPress site *is* a HTML site) so it's a bit difficult to answer.
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  • Profile picture of the author winning
    Wordpress has the SEO all in one plugin which is great and it is on a blog platform so you might get indexed quicker.
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    • Profile picture of the author Kevin AKA Hubcap
      Neither

      A properly structured and tagged html site will perform just as well as a wordpress site (with the appropriate plugins).

      The advantage that wordpress has is the speed at which you can add both content and seo information to the site. Also the structure of wordpress is inherently seo friendly (for the most part).

      Many people have the mistaken assumption that google loves wordpress. What google loves is fresh content and it doesn't really care if its delivered by straight html or a CMS like wordpress, joomla, or drupal.

      Kevin
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      • Profile picture of the author ChrisLang
        Kevin, I agree completely with you.

        What I wanted to point out is the ping ability of a blog. That is what I love best and of course the points you made too.
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  • Profile picture of the author ChrisLang
    Allot of things come into play, the age of the domain, the Wordpress theme, but above all you need some incoming links or the post is seen as irrelevant in the eyes of Google. That is why social bookmarking is so popular for blogs.

    I have noticed over the last two years of testing Wordpress that if you don't get links you may not even show up in Blog search.

    So check blog search and if you show up for the term you were targeting that is a good indicator that you will rank well.

    Too many things to say but one thing I can say in defense of WP is that a blog pings Google and let's them know you have a new post. Google spiders the post immediately and that is why you will find the post using a URL search.

    But I will say that WP is not optimized for SEO and how you name the blog has allot to how it ranks. Look at my site on Google Friend Connect. It ranks very well but one reason is I named the blog Google Friend Connect Wave is that I am targeting my prime term.

    Hope that helps and is not more confusing than what you started with.
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    • Profile picture of the author WareTime
      Originally Posted by ChrisLang View Post

      Allot of things come into play, the age of the domain, the Wordpress theme, but above all you need some incoming links or the post is seen as irrelevant in the eyes of Google. That is why social bookmarking is so popular for blogs.

      I have noticed over the last two years of testing Wordpress that if you don't get links you may not even show up in Blog search.

      So check blog search and if you show up for the term you were targeting that is a good indicator that you will rank well.

      Too many things to say but one thing I can say in defense of WP is that a blog pings Google and let's them know you have a new post. Google spiders the post immediately and that is why you will find the post using a URL search.

      But I will say that WP is not optimized for SEO and how you name the blog has allot to how it ranks. Look at my site on Google Friend Connect. It ranks very well but one reason is I named the blog Google Friend Connect Wave is that I am targeting my prime term.

      Hope that helps and is not more confusing than what you started with.
      Right on. How you name it is critical and that is a HUGE hint as to what on page factor has the most impact on your ranking.

      Wordpress is nice because it frees you up to just create content. It's not perfectly seo'd but is as good as most will ever achieve by hand and a time saver. Now if it just wouldn't get hacked every other day it would be worth running.
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  • Profile picture of the author clever7
    A Wordpress blog has many advantages and can easily be indexed. Here are some helpful tips:

    http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/21/5-ways-to-get-your-blog-indexed-by-google-in-24-hours/

    All the best!
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  • Profile picture of the author JesseT
    As with everyone else. The consensus is Wordpress is practically SEO'd for you. You just fill in the content.
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  • Profile picture of the author Louise Green
    I would go with Wordpress, but set your permalinks and install the SEO all in one plugin.

    Good luck with your site
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  • Profile picture of the author selma
    My original site is HTML, but it is not just pretty, its tagged, and clean, and no junk and great design, and then my new site is a WP site on the same domain, my old pages are archives... and guess where I am making almost ALL my money...

    From my old HTML pages, wordpress hasnt improved anything... and I kinda like the originalness of HTML pages... WP blogs are just soooo generic feeling...

    I miss those html old world pages days. honestly.
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  • Profile picture of the author JesseT
    You are able to modify Word press themes btw. With Firebug and Dreamweaver (or any other editor even notepad plus) You can customize your site to how you want it to feel.
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    • Profile picture of the author Sente
      Wordpress it is!

      Any ideas on how to set up WP on another site, enter everything and then move it to my live site?

      What I mean is, I have a site running html. I want to take that down and replace it with WP. I can set WP up on a different domain and tweak it and enter all my content. Then, can I take down the HTML site and install WP and somehow export everything to the new install?
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  • Profile picture of the author moneymoguls
    IMO...I would say that HTML is better for the simple reason of WordPress is bloated and has tons of code that the search engines have to read. HTML is less code intensive and has static pages...WordPress does not without a plugin. WordPress can be slow to load and visitors may leave. HTML is EXTREMELY FAST loading. HTML is way more customizable. You can place Adsense blocks anywhere you want. WordPress is much more difficult to customize.

    I recently bought Xsitepro and it is awesome for generating HTML code with a GUI. I used to use Dreamweaver but it was too complicated so I went to WordPress but now I'm doing xsitepro only.
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    • Profile picture of the author montanaflynn
      IMO...I would say that HTML is better for the simple reason of WordPress is bloated and has tons of code that the search engines have to read. HTML is less code intensive and has static pages...WordPress does not without a plugin. WordPress can be slow to load and visitors may leave. HTML is EXTREMELY FAST loading. HTML is way more customizable. You can place Adsense blocks anywhere you want. WordPress is much more difficult to customize.

      I recently bought Xsitepro and it is awesome for generating HTML code with a GUI. I used to use Dreamweaver but it was too complicated so I went to WordPress but now I'm doing xsitepro only.
      Wordpress is only as bloated as your theme. The search engines don't read the PHP.
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  • Profile picture of the author Stallion
    They're both the same. I've seen no difference between indexing times, nor with search engine results. Wordpress comes with an RSS feed, but you can manually make your own RSS feed for your HTML sites.

    I prefer HTML because it is much more customizable and that allows me to sell better. And everything loads a hell of a lot faster.
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    • Profile picture of the author JMartin
      Originally Posted by Stallion View Post

      They're both the same. I've seen no difference between indexing times, nor with search engine results. Wordpress comes with an RSS feed, but you can manually make your own RSS feed for your HTML sites.

      I prefer HTML because it is much more customizable and that allows me to sell better. And everything loads a hell of a lot faster.
      That's pretty much it. There is no difference at all. The only difference is how YOU use them and what you prefer.

      You can make your own themes in WP to do whatever you want just like you can make your on regular html pages or dynamic html pages with PHP or anything else.

      It only seems like WP is better, because it's decently SEOed out of the box and as we see every day, the majority of site owners don't know how to set up their sites properly, which is why we can continue to get page one rankings.
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      • Profile picture of the author oceanfan
        one issue that has been mentioned is SEO in WP. WP is not really SEO friendly right out of the box. you can add some common SEO features using the All-in-one SEO plugin. or you can add a whole lot of SEO features by using the Thesis theme for WP. Thesis has a ton of SEO features built right into the theme. you don't have to worry about plugins compatibilty or updating. i bought the developer version because i can use it on all the sites that i build. it's $164 but i think it is well worth it. you can learn/buy it at diythemes dot com.
        -joe
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  • Profile picture of the author InternetMarketingIQ
    They are just tools. And what you know how to do with the tools is what matters. I like WordPress because I don't want to babysit Code.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dano77
    Well one argument is 100% true, content is content no matter what it's sitting on....

    BUT...

    Wordpress as an RSS url which can be promoted to feed directories. You could CREATE that using a sitemap.xml or similar with a free tool like gsitemap but regardless, wordpress does it automatically.

    The old html/wordpress debate is an old one but the fact is that blogs are great for constantly changing content and HTML provides a freedom no joomla/mambo/wordpress/blogger template can provide with the flexibility to test just about any design.

    Dan
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    • Profile picture of the author dburk
      Hi Sente,

      Search engines definitely prefer HTML, but fortunately for Wordpress users the WP scripts output in HTML. The SE's don't care what server-side technology you use they only look at the HTML. Serve up some good HTML using Wordpress, any other CMS or hand coded, it doesn't make one bit of difference to the search engines.
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      • Profile picture of the author WareTime
        Originally Posted by dburk View Post

        Hi Sente,

        Search engines definitely prefer HTML, but fortunately for Wordpress users the WP scripts output in HTML. The SE's don't care what server-side technology you use they only look at the HTML. Serve up some good HTML using Wordpress, any other CMS or hand coded, it doesn't make one bit of difference to the search engines.
        Search engines prefer html perhaps because that is the lingua franca of the entire web. Every site on the web has html. All php database driven cms's output html, it could not be any other way.
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  • Profile picture of the author James Pateman
    Hi Sente,
    Wordpress has my vote. With about 7000 plugins to choose from, you don't need to know any html to have all the SEO benefits come your way.
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

    Regards,
    James Pateman
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  • Profile picture of the author blueice
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    • Profile picture of the author WareTime
      Originally Posted by blueice View Post

      HTML will always win outright. Wordpress is for people who cant write code efficiently. It`s a bit like buying from Ikea, it does the job but can`t compete with a craftsmans work.
      Or for people that want to do it quick. Same can be said for xsitepro. Take a look at the top ten serps in any niche. Tell me how much craftsmanship you see. There are reasons I prefer static html over wordpress, but code craftsmanship sure isn't one of them. Ugly code can rank and sell as well as w3c blessed code and for most it's a hell of a lot less frustrating to try to create.

      Time is money. Polishing your html is not money making.
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  • Profile picture of the author russell09
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    • Profile picture of the author WareTime
      Originally Posted by russell09 View Post

      Hi Sente
      I got a topic.
      When coming up with an SEO optimized theme, you should take care of the following:
      • have the H1 on archive pages and the homepage set to the title of those pages, or the name of your blog
      • set the H1 on single posts or pages to be the title of the post/page
      This causes an issue with subheadings when composing your posts. In the category pages the articles titles will be the H2, but in the individual posts the articles titles will be the H1. Do you set your subheadings to start at H2 and please the single pages, or H3 and please the category pages?
      This plugin resolves the issue by replacing subheading tags with the following on pages where the plugin tag is added:
      • H2 into H3
      • H3 into H4
      • H4 into H5
      • H5 into H6
      • H6 into P.headingSix
      No need to give a crap about the <h> tags anymore for an seo benefit. For document organization sure, but seo, not anymore.
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  • Profile picture of the author tootalldave
    I have been typing HTML for over 10 years and have always avoided the WYSIWYG editors, but Wordpress with all the free themes and plugins available that do pretty much anything you can imagine. Wordpress will only improve as time goes on.
    Also i have got my sites indexed faster with Wordpress.

    You can type the code yourself and install Java, Javascript, PHP programs to compete with Wordpress, but unless you have a special need like a site that runs off a data feed, i would avoid the old manual way
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