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Experts in online marketing consulting emphasize a primary goal: getting your site indexed and ranked with the search engines.

Not long ago, they would have said a blog might help you do that. They likely wouldn’t have recommended that a blog serve as your main site.

Thanks to advances in content management software, however, that’s no longer the case. The line between conventional websites and blogs has all but disappeared.

“Blogging” programs have evolved into some of the most powerful and flexible content management systems available. One of the leading packages, WordPress, is completely free.

WordPress For Content Management

Sites built with WordPress can easily include static pages and sections. Technically, you will have a “blog,” but it can be made to appear virtually indistinguishable from any other site on the Web.

For new website owners who want to manage their own sites without learning code, content management systems like WordPress are particularly attractive.

Rather than compromising on your available SEO options by running your site with blog software, you are actually gaining some unique and affordable SEO advantages and opportunities.

Effortless Structure

Content management systems allow material to be easily categorized. Search engines love structure. Categorization options will allow you to keep a more orderly site that will naturally perform better with the search engine spiders.

By establishing and sticking to categories, you can effectively group relevant material and keep up with keywords and anchor text you’re optimizing. This includes:

- URLs with anchor text. Blog software makes it easier to create “crawlable” URLs that include your keyword phrases and anchor text.

- Relevant internal links. By grouping material in categories, you can make sure your internal links are relevant and doing the best job of dispersing PageRank across your site.

(All reliable online marketing consulting professionals stress the importance of relevant internal linking.)

Creating Fresh Content

Software like WordPress was specifically designed to handle the frequent creation of content. By regularly updating a portion of your site, either as a “news” section or as conventional blog commentary, you will:

- get crawled more often by the search engines,
- cultivate a regular readership to generate “word of mouth” traffic,
- more readily attract inbound links,
- and develop site “authority” faster.

The “blogosphere” is a social environment. Studies show that blogs trade links much more often than conventional websites.

By including a “blogroll” or list of links to relevant sites in your sidebar, you will find that other bloggers organically return the favor. Inbound links bring PageRank to your site and create a greater perception of site authority.

Traffic And Links Via Comments

Commenting plays a large role in link sharing on blog sites. Comments and trackback features further encourage interaction among sites and increase overall visibility.

Be warned, however, that for comments to best serve your site, you will need to engage you readers by answering their comments and by visiting their sites and leaving comments of your own.

(Note that comments can be turned on and off throughout your site with the WordPress system.)

Links In “Unconventional” Locations

Syndicating a site managed with blog software via RSS is a largely automatic process. By actively managing your RSS feed, however, you can include links and generate traffic that does not come directly from the search engines.

Further, your site will be eligible for inclusion in blog directories and will be crawled by blog-specific search engines where your competition may have no presence whatsoever.

Content management software like WordPress will:

- impose structure and order on your site,
- strengthen the use of anchor text in your urls,
- encourage the addition of fresh content,
- lead to organic links in the blogosphere,
- increase the frequency with which the search engines crawl your site,
- gain visibility for the site in areas your competition may ignore,
- and generate a greater sense of authority for you and your site.

So, how can using the software to manage your site be a bad idea in terms of SEO?

Wrapping It Up

Content management systems, when used with the basic principles stressed by online marketing consulting professionals, are simply another tool in an affordable SEO arsenal.

Such systems do not change the core purpose for establishing your site, they simply provide a different means of maintenance and improvement.

While you may spend money initially to have your site’s WordPress installation customized, overall, you will save on dollars that would otherwise go to a webmaster. Over time, that money can be spent on other SEO strategies.

With the ability to more easily and quickly manage your own site, you are not at the mercy of another person’s schedule. At the same time, the native controls built into the software will give you greater control over your efforts to gain search engine ranking.

That’s a win / win in anyone’s book.

Author’s Note: This article previously published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a
realistic budget. He’s an Online
Marketing Consultant professional marketing services and Affordable
SEO (and d-i-y Coaching). Get to know Paul, just visit Strategic
Web Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall

Frankly, the biggest search engine optimization mistake you can make is not doing any SEO at all. It’s amazing how many people believe “if you build it, they will come.” Marketing coaching makes one thing clear. Just putting a site up on the Internet won’t get you the traffic you want or need. By the same token, building a site and then thinking about SEO after the fact is a bad plan too. SEO needs to be at the heart of your Web plans from day one, and it’s a job that’s never “finished.”

Learn What’s Bad For SEO And Don’t Do It

If you take a drawing class, one of the first things you’ll learn is that it’s easier to look at the negative space than at the object itself. That means that as a beginner, you have a better shot at recreating the funky-looking space between the apple and the pear than drawing the fruit the first time you pick up a pencil. And you don’t get so discouraged when your results aren’t perfect. That’s a good concept to carry into online marketing.

Sometimes learning everything that can go wrong is a better place to start than trying to do everything right. Do-it-yourself, affordable SEO is too expensive at any cost if you’re constantly shooting yourself in the foot. Some of the biggest mistakes novices make are really the easiest ones to avoid!

Bad Navigation And No Sitemap

It doesn’t take a marketing coach to know that the entire point of “search engine optimization” on a site is to get that site crawled by the search engines. If you use images — or worse — Flash or javascript to design your navigation, the search engines will ignore you. (Also, any page that doesn’t have an incoming link won’t be crawled.)

Not having a sitemap is just as bad. Many website owners don’t think they need a sitemap because people don’t use them. It’s not about people! Search engines love sitemaps. They literally crawl all over sitemaps. Even if you have to maintain the sitemap manually, have one and link to it on every page of your site.

Poorly Constructed Title Tags And URLs

There’s nothing wrong with building your own website, but pay attention to what your software is doing. Many site building packages and content management systems repeat the same title tag on every single page. Good programs of marketing coaching teach you that the title tag is probably the single most-important SEO element of any page. The title tag must fit the content of the page itself.

But, don’t pay attention to the title tag and ignore the URL. This is especially a problem in content management systems and shopping carts. The URLs are full of numbers and letters. You need to be including your keywords in your URLs so the search engines pick up on them. Don’t waste the invaluable potential in either the title tag or the URL.

Banning A Search Engine By Accident

It’s not unusual for a novice site owner to mess up their robots.txt file. The file exists in your site’s root directory to talk to search engine spiders. You can tell them not to crawl pages or sections or send other individual instructions. Since the file is just plain text and is so easy to create, site owners wade in without really understanding what they’re doing. If you’re not careful, you can ban the search engines from your site altogether. Use Yahoo SiteExplorer or Google SiteMaps to make sure that your site can indeed by crawled.

Vague Anchor Text For Links

Using anchor text like “click here” or “next” is a waste. When you are cultivating incoming links or creating your own links inside your site, use useful, descriptive anchor text. You don’t want to repeat the same phrase over and over again. Get two or three relevant, keyword-rich pieces of anchor text and also use your company name. Empty phrases are just that — empty.

Doing accurate keyword research is fundamental to successful online marketing. It’s a huge topic in its own right, but you basically want to concentrate on phrases that are not overly general or that have too much competition. Good marketing coaches will spend a lot of time on keyword selection and you should too. Put that chore right up at the top of your SEO “to do” list.

In reading all the tips available on marketing coaching, you’ll find that most articles and courses focus on the things website owners should do. It’s also important to look at what you shouldn’t do. A poorly constructed site that fails to make good use of readable navigation, workable behind-the-scenes code, solid naming structures, and relevant anchor text will have a tough time online. Consider the fundamentals of basic SEO from the planning stage of your site to maximize your results and get the traffic you want.

Previously published here.

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Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a realistic budget. He’s a Marketing Coaching expert offering professional marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). He also offers Marketing.net today!

Read more articles written by Paul Marshall