In a previous post, I talked about the benefits of using WordPress for your website.  While I discussed look, programming, easy of use, etc., another important element is the SEO benefits.

WordPress makes adding SEO-friendly elements easy.

• Title.  During the installation process, you’re typically asked for this information.  However, it can be changed after the fact.  How you do this is not as important as what you do with it.  Your blog title needs to include your keywords.  Plus, the second tag line needs to further emphasize the words you’re targeting for search ability.
• Ping Services.  There’s a service option that allows you to “notify” web sites that follow blogs that you blog has made an update.  (The alternative is that you would have to manually run around all over the internet trying to do this yourself.)  By allowing your site to be “pinged” (as it’s called), your site is seen by the search engines as more social plus, you’ll get additional traffic.  Then when people surf around on web sites such as Technorati and Sphere, there’s a better chance they’ll find you.
• Meta Tags.  These are quite important and, just like with a regular web site, there is no way for these to “magically” appear.  Instead, you need to come up with them and have them placed into your blog. The good news is that there’s a plugin that helps with this.  The bad news is that writing them can be tough if you don’t know what you’re doing.
• Page Names.  When working in a traditional web site, you had to name every page and make sure you were entering the right keywords, etc.  In WordPress, all you have to do is enable a permalink option, and the title of your post is automatically formatted as the page name.
• Sitemap.  A Google sitemap is a file that contains the file information about your web site.  There are plenty of sitemap programs out there that will create the sitemap for you.  Yet, again, there’s no need to leave the comfort of the WordPress Admin panel as there’s a plugin for this as well.
• Social Media Bookmarks.  You’ve seen a blog with all the little icons for Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, etc.  Those allow your blog to get “bookmarked” on the social media web sites.  Again, on a traditional web site, this would have been a highly customized feature.  However, with the right plugin selected and installed (and you need an experienced blog developer for this one) these icons can appear almost anywhere you like.

Sure: the traditional web site will still serve a purpose.  However, for the solopreneur or business owner who wants to have a lot more functionality as well as a greater chance of having an awesome online presence, a WordPress website is the way to go.