Many Microsoft partners are hesitant to use WordPress™ to power their website for a multitude of reasons.  Partners want to focus on Microsoft^® products as they tend to integrate together more seamlessly and have commercially available support.  Their expertise lies in Microsoft products and services and using Open Source UNIX^® software in their infrastructure is akin to using a Ford part in a Ferrari.  This article is going to help you understand why we recommend the use of WordPress for partner sites and why we think it fits in nicely with the rest of your Microsoft infrastructure.

Not Just a Blogging Platform

Most people think of WordPress as simply a blogging platform.  This is how WordPress got its start however recently the community has released features that allow it to be used as content management system as well.

Some of these features are:

• Revision management;
• Ability to create custom post types;
• Template System;
• Plug-in Architecture;
• UTF8 data types for full multilingual support;
• Theme architecture.

Typical Partner Website

Typical partner websites are not complex beasts requiring massive customizations as this would lead to just confusing potential prospects.  Your website should be cleanly designed with SEO in mind to help drive prospects to your site, allow them to find the information they need and drive them towards a contact request to become a prospect.  Ability to integrate with marketing automation software is a must and your site also needs the ability to be quickly updated with new copy as your business changes.  Adding new landing pages for campaigns, for specials and for deals is also a major requirement.

WordPress with its basic content management and tagging capability makes it easy for anyone to edit content and tags to quickly spread search keywords throughout your site. Setting up a blog for creating events and marketing campaigns is also relatively simple.  It’s platform agnostic design should provide no hindrance to integration with any marketing automation software available.

What About Sharepoint/MOSS?

Implementing a Content Management System (CMS) can be a costly affair if you are implementing a complex CMS like Ektron, MOSS or Sitecore.  These products contains bells and whistles that are great for large corporations with complex department structures, intranet requirements, eCommerce and document management capabilities; however, most are lacking basic features relating to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that partners need.  These products also come with a large purchase price tags and annual maintenance costs.  This money is better invested into developing your site and paying for hosting rather than paying for features you need to pay a consultant to remove.

It Can’t Be Good, It’s Free

People often use the term “You get what you pay for”. However, this is not always true in the software world.  WordPress is the #1 CMS on the internet today based on install base alone.  A quick Bing™ search for “Powered by WordPress” returns 645K results.  There are more than 350K WordPress blogs on WordPress.com alone.  No other for pay or free CMS can boast this large of an install base with such a huge consultant network.

Not Compatible with Microsoft Windows

Microsoft itself has seen how useful a tool like WordPress can be. This year, they not only announced the migration of Live Spaces™ to WordPress.com, but also released an installer for Windows.  Microsoft Web Matrix Beta can install PHP, MySQL^®, WordPress and automatically set it up in IIS^®.  This has always been the most difficult part of getting WordPress up and running on windows.  If you use IIS7, you’ll have full support for permalinks and file uploads without any issues.

Has your organization deployed WordPress for your main website or blog?  Let us know your experiences running WordPress on the Windows platform in the comments section below.

References

http://WordPress.org

http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2010/09/27/118149.aspx

People ask where they should set up their new company blog to maximize their blog’s SEO effectiveness. Answers are always varied and mostly, in my humble opinion, incorrect.

To take full advantage of the search engine optimization benefits of setting up a new company blog, there’s only one answer.

But first, how does a blog help with your search engine optimization efforts in the first place?

It’s all about backlinks.

When it comes to SEO, there are two key areas on which to focus — on-page optimization (optimizing your web pages and site code for relevant keywords) and link building. Building backlinks to your website is important because the search engines (particularly Google) use the quantity (and quality) of the backlinks to your website as an important ranking factor in the formula they use to rank the sites that show up in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

By posting quality content on your company blog, people who read your posts will be more likely to link to your posts if they see value in them, and feel that they would be of interest to their own readers.

Quality content = More backlinks to your posts = Better search engine rankings

Where You Should Set Up Your Blog

For setting up a new blog, you’ve got two options:

• Use a hosted service (Blogger.com, WordPress.com)
• Install blog software on your web server (We love WordPress! – WordPress.org)

Remotely Hosted

Google’s Blogger service does allow a self-hosted option where you use the Blogger interface to post to and manage your blog and give it access to your server via FTP, but we’re really interested in software that you can install on your web server.

Hosted In-House

If you’re installing the blog software on your own server you’ll also need to decide where to put it:

1. Register a new domain for your blog (www.yourcompanyblog.com)
2. Put the blog in a subdomain (blog.yourcompany.com)
3. Put the blog in a subfolder of your main website (www.yourcompany.com/blog)

For search engine optimization, hosting your blog on your own domain will have the most benefit — assuming you’re using your blog to help your optimization efforts for your main website (www.yourcompany.com).

Subdomain vs. Subfolder (The Subfolder Wins)

When you (or your web developer) set up your blog, make sure to set it up in a subfolder of your domain instead of as a subdomain — www.yourcompany.com/blog instead of blog.yourcompany.com.

Remember, the #1 SEO benefit for setting up a blog on your site is the backlinks that you get to your blog posts. If you set it up as blog.yourdomain.com, the search engines see the subdomain as a separate site entirely, and your blog backlinks will not add to the overall link popularity of www.yourdomain.com.

Putting your blog in a subfolder means that links back to your blog posts will count towards your whole site’s link popularity.

Search engines don’t only measure the number of backlinks you have to your website’s homepage. They also count the number of backlinks you have to the subpages of your website, including your blog posts. Having more backlinks to your website’s subpages helps to increase your deep link ratio (we’ll cover that in a future post).

If you were to use a hosted blog service like Blogger (with your blog at yourcompany.blogspot.com), this would have minimal benefit to your main website SEO.

You could build backlinks to the Blogger hosted blog and build up its authority, then link to your main site from the blog, but why bother. Cut out the middleman…

Don’t make this SEO Mistake

In discussions on where to host a company blog, I’ve seen people recommend setting up both — signing up for a hosted blog service as well as installing blog software on your server. Don’t.

That would double your workload as you’d need to have unique content for both. You wouldn’t want to duplicate posts on each blog, as this would result in duplicate content, and you’d also be splitting potential backlinks to posts between the hosted blog and the one on your domain.

Finally, hosting your own blog also allows you to maximize your SEO efforts by using a variety of plug-ins and software add-ons. You can’t do this with a Blogger or WordPress hosted blog.

Questions or comments? Let us know!