If you’ve ever built a website, you’ve probably heard of WordPress. It’s the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world, with over 40% of all websites built on the platform. But what is WordPress, exactly? How does it work? And why is it so great for SEO?

In this article, we’ll answer those questions and more.

CMS? What’s that!?

A CMS, or Content Management System, is a software application that allows you to create, manage, and publish digital content on the web. It’s essentially a platform that provides you with a set of tools and features to help you build and maintain a website without needing to write code or have technical expertise.

Using a CMS, you can easily add text, images, videos, and other media to your website through a user-friendly interface with a wide variety of tools and capabilities. Structure and navigation, content categorization and tagging, and additional features like contact forms and social media sharing buttons are all under your control.

One of the key benefits of using a CMS is that it allows you to separate your website’s design and content. This means that you can change your website’s design without affecting your content, and vice versa. This makes it easier to update your website and make changes without having to start from scratch.

Ok, so WordPress is a CMS. But what is WordPress?

WordPress is a free, open-source software that allows you to create and manage websites. It was first released in 2003 as a blogging platform, but it has since evolved into a full-fledged CMS that can be used to create any type of website.

WordPress is built on PHP, a server-side scripting language, and uses a MySQL database to store and organize your website’s content. It also uses a templating system that allows you to control the design and layout of your website.

How does WordPress work?

When you install WordPress on your website, it creates a database and a set of files that make up the core software. You can then log in to the WordPress dashboard, where you can create and manage pages, posts, media, and other content.

WordPress also allows you to install themes and plugins, which can be used to customize the design and functionality of your website. Themes are pre-designed templates that control the look and feel of your website, while plugins are add-ons that provide additional features and functionality.

To create a new page or post in WordPress, you simply log in to the dashboard and click on the “Pages” or “Posts” section. From there, you can add text, images, and other content using the built-in editor.

WordPress also allows you to customize the permalink structure of your website’s URLs, which can help with SEO (search engine optimization). And because WordPress is open-source, it has a large community of developers who create new themes, plugins, and other tools to enhance its functionality.

What makes WordPress so great for SEO?

It’s very user-friendly, even for non-technical people.

WordPress is known for being one of the most user-friendly content management systems available. One of the reasons for this is its intuitive and straightforward user interface. When you log into your WordPress dashboard, you’re presented with a simple menu on the left-hand side of the screen. This menu contains all of the tools you need to create and manage your website’s content, including pages, posts, media, and plugins.

Another way WordPress is user-friendly is through its visual editor. Instead of having to write code or use a complicated interface, you can create pages and posts using a simple, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. This means you can add text, images, and other media to your website just as easily as you would in a word processing program.

WordPress also makes it easy to customize the design and functionality of your website. With thousands of themes and plugins available, you can find one that fits your needs and install it with just a few clicks. And if you need to make more advanced customizations, WordPress allows you to edit your website’s code directly through its built-in code editor.

WordPress is continuously improved via community support. Because it’s an open-source platform, there are millions of users and developers around the world who contribute to its development and provide support to others. This means you can find answers to your questions, access tutorials, and guides, and get help when you need it.

WordPress makes it simple to manage content for SEO.

One of the key factors in ranking well in search engines is having fresh, high-quality content on your site. This is where WordPress excels, as it makes it easy to create and manage your content in a user-friendly interface. With WordPress, you can easily add new pages and posts, edit existing content, and organize your content using categories and tags.

WordPress’s content editor, called the Gutenberg editor, provides a range of formatting options that make it easy to create engaging and visually appealing content. You can add headings, paragraphs, images, videos, and other media to your content with just a few clicks. Additionally, there are many third-party plugins available that can enhance the functionality of the editor and provide additional options for formatting and styling your content.

WordPress also allows you to schedule your content to be published at specific times and dates, which can be useful for ensuring a steady flow of fresh content on your site. This can be especially important for businesses that want to maintain an active blog or news section on their site.

WordPress SEO plugins offer a ton of functions and SEO customization options.

One of the reasons why WordPress is a great CMS for SEO is its wide range of SEO plugins. These plugins provide tools and features that can help you optimize your website for search engines, improve your website’s visibility, and drive more traffic to your site.

For example, many SEO plugins provide keyword research tools that allow you to find the best keywords to target for your website. They can also analyze your website’s content and suggest changes to improve its SEO, such as optimizing your meta tags, titles, and descriptions.

WordPress SEO plugins can also help you create and manage your website’s sitemap, which is a file that lists all of the pages on your website and helps search engines understand its structure. They can also provide tools for monitoring your website’s search engine rankings, analyzing your website’s traffic, and tracking your website’s performance over time.

One of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress is Yoast SEO. This plugin provides a range of features and tools to help you optimize your website for search engines, including a real-time content analysis tool that checks your posts and pages for SEO best practices. It also provides tools for managing your website’s meta tags, titles, and descriptions, as well as generating XML sitemaps and social media metadata.

Another popular SEO plugin is RankMath. This plugin provides similar features to Yoast SEO, including tools for optimizing your website’s content, managing your meta tags, and generating XML sitemaps. It also includes features for controlling how your website’s content appears on social media platforms and provides advanced options for customizing your website’s SEO.

SEO plugins make WordPress great for SEO by providing a range of tools and features that help you optimize your website for search engines. By using these plugins, you can improve your website’s visibility, drive more traffic to your site, and ultimately achieve better search engine rankings.

WordPress is great for mobile users.

Most WordPress themes are mobile-responsive, which means they are designed to automatically adjust to different screen sizes and resolutions. This makes it easy for visitors to access your website on their smartphones and tablets without having to pinch and zoom or scroll horizontally.

In addition to being mobile-responsive, WordPress offers a range of mobile-friendly themes and plugins that are specifically designed for mobile visitors. These themes and plugins can help optimize your website’s design and functionality for mobile devices, ensuring a smooth and seamless user experience.

This is all helpful for website visitors. But what about website administrators? Well, WordPress has thought of that too. The WordPress app allows you to manage your website on-the-go from your smartphone or tablet. You can create and publish blog posts, manage comments, and even view website analytics from the app.

WordPress makes permalink management a breeze.

WordPress makes it easy to customize your website’s permalink structure, which is the URL structure of your website’s pages and posts. This is important for SEO because search engines use your website’s URLs to understand the content of your pages and posts.

In WordPress, you can customize your permalink structure by going to the Settings > Permalinks section of the dashboard. From there, you can choose from a variety of pre-set options, such as date-based permalinks or post name permalinks. You can also create a custom permalink structure by using a combination of tags and variables.

One of the benefits of using WordPress for permalink structure changes is that it automatically updates all of the links on your website when you make a change. This means that you don’t have to worry about broken links or redirects when you change your permalink structure.

WordPress also makes it easy to optimize your permalink structure for SEO. For example, you can use keywords in your URLs to help search engines understand the content of your pages and posts. You can also use descriptive, readable URLs that are easy for users to understand and remember.

By customizing your permalink structure in WordPress, you can improve your website’s SEO by making it easier for search engines to understand your content and by creating user-friendly URLs that are easy to share and remember. Plus, because WordPress makes it so easy to make these changes, you can experiment with different permalink structures to find the one that works best for your website and your audience.

WordPress makes it easy to optimize images for SEO.

Images are an important part of any website, and optimizing them is crucial for SEO. Optimized images can help improve your website’s load time, increase its search engine visibility, and enhance the user experience. Fortunately, WordPress makes image optimization easy.

One of the ways WordPress makes image optimization easy is by automatically compressing images when you upload them to your website. This means that your images will take up less space on your server, which can help improve your website’s load time. WordPress also allows you to choose from different image sizes when you upload images, so you can choose the size that works best for your website’s design and layout.

WordPress also offers a range of plugins that can help optimize your images even further. For example, the Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin can automatically compress and optimize your images, reducing their file size without sacrificing quality. The plugin can also optimize images in bulk, making it easy to optimize all of the images on your website at once.

Another way WordPress makes image optimization easy is by allowing you to add alt text to your images. Alt text is a description of an image that is used by search engines to understand its content. By adding alt text to your images, you can help improve your website’s search engine visibility and make your content more accessible to users who are using screen readers or who have images turned off in their browsers.

WordPress sites have built-in features to improve speed.

Site speed is an important factor for SEO, as Google and other search engines use it as a ranking factor. Slow loading times can lead to a poor user experience, which can result in lower engagement and higher bounce rates. Fortunately, WordPress is well-known for its fast loading times, which can help improve your website’s SEO.

One of the reasons why WordPress is good for site speed is because it uses a range of caching and optimization techniques to speed up page load times. For example, WordPress uses Gzip compression to reduce the size of your website’s files, which can help them load faster. It also uses browser caching to store certain files on a user’s device, allowing them to load faster on subsequent visits.

WordPress also offers a range of plugins and tools that can help optimize your website’s performance even further. For example, the WP Fastest Cache plugin can improve your website’s load times by creating cached versions of your pages and posts. This means that when a user visits your website, they’ll see a version of the page that has already been generated, rather than having to wait for the page to be generated from scratch.

Another way WordPress is good for site speed is by offering a range of themes and plugins that are optimized for speed. For example, there are many lightweight and fast-loading themes that are specifically designed to provide a great user experience on all devices, including mobile. The Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin can also help speed up your website by automatically compressing and optimizing your images.

WordPress facilitates the use of schema markup for SEO.

Schema markup is a type of code that provides additional information about your content to search engines, such as Google. This information can help search engines better understand the content on your site, and ultimately improve your rankings in search results. WordPress supports schema markup, which means you can easily add it to your site’s pages and posts.

Schema markup allows you to provide more detailed information about your content, such as the type of content, the author, the date published, and more. This information can be especially useful for certain types of content, such as reviews, events, and recipes. By including this information in your schema markup, search engines can provide more detailed and relevant results to users.

WordPress makes it easy to add schema markup to your site using plugins like Yoast SEO, RankMath, or Schema Pro. These plugins provide pre-defined schema markup templates for different types of content, and allow you to customize the information to fit your specific content. They also provide a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to add and manage your schema markup.

Key SEO tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.

One of the biggest advantages of using WordPress for SEO is its easy integration with other tools and platforms. WordPress has built-in support for Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which are essential tools for tracking and analyzing your site’s performance in search engines. By connecting your WordPress site to these tools, you can monitor your traffic, track your rankings, and identify areas for improvement.

In addition to Google Analytics and Google Search Console, WordPress also integrates seamlessly with social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This makes it easy to share your content on social media, which can help boost your SEO by increasing your visibility and driving traffic back to your site. WordPress also supports social media plugins that allow you to display social media feeds, follow buttons, and share buttons on your site, making it easy for visitors to connect with you on social media and share your content with their own followers.

Another advantage of WordPress’s easy integration is that it allows you to connect your site to other marketing and analytics tools, such as email marketing platforms and heat mapping software. This can help you better understand your audience and tailor your content and marketing strategies to their needs and interests.

Overall, WordPress is a great CMS for SEO. However, it’s important to keep in mind that SEO is a complex and ongoing process that requires more than just a good CMS. You’ll also need to create high-quality, relevant content, build high-quality backlinks, and stay up-to-date with the latest SEO best practices to achieve the best results. If you need SEO help for your WordPress website or even an entirely new website build, contact Ice Nine Online.

About the Author

Matt Chiera

Matt Chiera is Founder & Principal Consultant at Ice Nine Online. Since forming the company in 2014, he’s helped Ice Nine Online’s clients generate millions of dollars in revenue from digital marketing. Matt taught digital marketing strategy and tactics at the Tribeca School’s Digital Professional Institute. Matt’s book “Digital Marketers Sound Off” has been ranked as the #1 book in the Web Marketing category on Amazon.

Why WordPress CMS Reigns Supreme for SEO-Optimized Websites