Good Marketing Starts With a Good Platform: Wordpress as a CMS
Set it and forget it. This era is long gone in the search engine marketing industry. It used to be that you could set up a website properly and leave it to be found by Google and the others and this would be sufficient to get good rankings.
Enter Web 2.0.
I know what you are thinking… Â “I am not even Web 1.0 yet, much less Web 2.0.”
Don’t worry, there is an extremely simple way to graduate your dental website into the Web 2.0 era and its name is Wordpress.
Web 2.0 implies that the content of your dental website is fresh, up to date and interactive. Wordpress gives you all of these things and it is very easy to use (see the video below).
Wordpress spent its younger years perfecting the blogging platform. The blog you are reading right now is built on the Wordpress platform. In fact, most of the blogs you are reading are probably built on the Wordpress platform. It became popular because of the following attributes:
-Â It is FREE!
-Â It is ridiculously easy to use
-Â It is extremely friendly to search engines
-Â It is open source and there are tens of thousands of people adding great applications to it every day.
Over the last couple of years Wordpress has become much more than a blogging platform. It is an entire Content Management System that can be used to manipulate nearly every element of your website with a couple of clicks.
Don’t believe me?? Watch this short video showing you how easy it is to add content to your Wordpress site.
Web 2.0 Advantages of Using Wordpress
Control Your Own Design — Controlling the design elements on your website is just as simple as adding text content. Swap images in and out, add video, change the header image of your site all without knowing a lick of HTML or CSS.
Add Fresh Content — The search engines absolutely love websites that are adding fresh content to the web. If the search engine returns to your website time after time to find the same old stale content, it will not visit very often. The search engine will also start to think of your website as outdated and potentially full of misinformation. This is not the kind of search results Google and the others like to return for the searcher. Adding fresh content to your website using Wordpress is the most healthy action you can be taking for your website.
RSS — RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication.’ RSS is built in to every Wordpress design and it allows you to send your content out to anyone that is subscribing to your RSS feed. It is Web 2.0 at its finest. RSS subscribers can get your content where they want it and when they want it.
For those that are wondering why anyone would want to have your content about the latest piece of dental equipment in your office beamed to them via RSS, you are missing the point. RSS is a way for your content to become portable. It builds links back to your website and alerts search engines and social media sites to the fact that you have a fresh and up to date website.
Plug-Ins — A plug-in is an application that can be easily added to a Content Management System. Wordpress has thousands of them. Add scrolling images, a calendar, a contact form, and virtually anything else you can possibly think of. If you need it, chances are that someone has already created it and it is available for free.
Check out all of the Wordpress Plugins here.
Below is a link to an example website that is using Wordpress as a Content Management System:
http://www.naplesgreenbuilders.com/
Virtually everything on this site can be manipulated as easily as the text that was shown in the video above.
As always let me know if you have any questions by leaving a comment or contacting me here.
March 1, 2009
Posted in: Create Great Content, Tools for Your Arsenal, Website Design
One Response
Wordpress is indeed the best CMS out there. But as their versioning progresses, it is becoming harder for new people to get into the bandwagon. Personally, I use wordpress on all my design works and CMS requirements.
But wordpress is not without flaws, wordpress is useless in terms of its internal search. but hey, thats solvable with plugins!
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