Starting life as a free, open-source blogging tool, WordPress has quickly evolved into one of the most popular pieces of software on the planet. Although blogging was originally its primary function, due to the extensive level of customization, WordPress can become almost any configuration users need. Furthermore, with an installation that is known for its simplicity, WordPress can be incredibly easy to use, depending on the work you need it to do.
One of the main features that are often pushed by WordPress is the vast amount of plugins and extensions that the program can handle. By offering such a large variety of notoriously easy to incorporate plug-ins, the WordPress extension library can make changes as large scale as you need, from turning the blog into an online store to simply changing the color of the background and fonts used. The amount of customization available is only limited by how much work you’re willing to put in, as the extensions can create pretty much any configuration you need. Furthermore, as with any good blogging site, themes and widgets are available to make small level changes to your page.
Although there is an installation-free version available online, the WordPress software is much more effective for people looking to control every aspect of the blog, from the layout and content, to the responsibility of managing their own server. Although it requires a little more work, the knowledge necessary for maintaining the server is minimal and the advantages it offers are numerous. Furthermore, since the software is also free, including the extensions, themes and plugins, WordPress software makes sure that regardless of what is installed, users never have to pay for their blog.
While WordPress is a powerful tool from the offset, the main strength it has is in its plug-ins. By using certain extensions, WordPress can increase its functionality in a variety of ways, one of the most popular being for SEO optimization. Yoast, for example, offers one of the most powerful SEO plugins available, WordPress SEO. This piece of software incorporates everything necessary to optimize a pages’ content, including the title, descriptions and XML sitemaps, it has a variety of tools to ensure they’re all optimized correctly. Once optimized, WordPress SEO can then show how the listing would appear in Google, even allowing focus keywords to be implemented.
This type of software can be incredibly useful if posting certain content to a blog that has been purchased. If an article was bought from TopicBay for instance, WordPress and the SEO plugin could be used to not only easily upload the article, but also ensure that the SEO keywords within the article are optimized correctly to show up within a search engine. This can be perfect for those who are looking to get content written by others quickly published onto their blog. TopicBay, for instance, allows buyers to either choose an article that has already been written or request a certain article. Generally, these requested articles will contain a certain keyword and by using WordPress SEO, buyers can then ensure that the page is optimized with these keywords. The ease of use already established with WordPress is transferred to the SEO plugin, so even people untrained in the program can get the full benefit.
Written by: Tom Hodson