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Why WordPress is now my Blog of choice
I love it. It has 2 very important features that Blogger does not yet support.
Number 1, you can configure WordPress to automatically ping all RSS feed and blog directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to receive a lot of traffic immediately. you'll be quickly developing back links automatically.
Think about how long it can take to build a normal site, have search engines index it, get backlinks to improve your listings and then start getting traffic. A blog like WordPress can do all that "grunge" work automatically.
Number 2, WordPress allows the use of Categories. Categories are a very powerful way to improve the structure of your site for both human visitors and search engines.
Let's say the theme of your site is Widgets. You can create a Category for black widgets, one for orange widgets and one for green widgets.
Now, when you add posts to your blog, you can choose which categories your post belongs to. Now your blog will archive your previous posts not only by their month and date, as Blogger does. But also by category.
So, if you have a visitor who is especially interested in green widgets, you can easily find all your posts in green widgets. You don't have to check all the files to find them. With a blog that has been around for a while and has hundreds of posts, that would be quite daunting. Using categories makes it very easy.
The categories are also very friendly for search engines. When you use Categories in your blog, there is a link on each of your pages to your categories. Think about this: would you rather be number 1 in search engines for March 2003, or for green widgets, one of the main keywords of your site?
When using the Category function, you will eventually have hundreds of pages on your site with links to green widgets, black widgets and orange widgets. All those backlinks to those keywords can lead to much higher search engine rankings.
Another interesting feature is that you can easily create an RSS feed for each of its categories. Then, every time you post to your blog, you could be pinging the Blog / RSS directories for each feed.
Compare that with putting a new page on a traditional website. Even if search engines find your new page immediately, it may take a month or two before it really gets indexed and begins to attract traffic. It may take a long time before you enjoy a first page position for your keywords.
It's almost amazing how easy this is with a well structured blog like Wordpress with Categories enabled!
