Stephan Spencer on SEO

I just watched a great interview with Stephan Spencer from this years Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago on the webpronews video blog. 

Stephan is pretty high on WordPress as a CMS, most of the speakers that I have seen from this years conference were, which was good to hear. He also recommends a few other platforms that he likes for SEO.  Here is a link to his interview…

We’ve talked many times about the advantages of blogging. One area that we haven’t touched on a lot however is the SEO benefits of blogging. In this video, Stephan Spencer discusses the SEO friendly blogging platforms and the non-SEO friendly blogging platforms.

First of all, Stephan debunks the theory that simply having a blog makes it search engine friendly. While there is a bit of truth to the theory, there are many other benefits that people are missing. For instance, PageRank isn’t always accurate and tag pages and tag clouds aren’t used to their full potential.

Stephan highly recommends WordPress as a blogging platform. The great thing about many of these blogging platforms including WordPress, is that a blog doesn’t have to look like a typical blog. WordPress can be used as a content management system (CMS) and is very search friendly. Stephan’s company site, Netconcepts.com, is a perfect example of this. If he hadn’t told us, no would ever know that the site was running as a WordPress blog.

Another blogging platform Stephan recommends is b2evolution. It brings SEO improvements that aren’t available in other blogging platforms. This platform is also free and runs on your own domain or website.

Lastly, Stephan does not recommend Blogger. His main arguments against it are its limitations. According to Stephan, Blogger users cannot set up 301 redirects and cannot incorporate tag clouds.

Now that you have a couple of recommendations to work with, go out there and utilize these blogging platforms!

Video: Stephan Spencer on SEO Perks in Blogging