What Makes A Blog Platform Search-Friendly?

When deciding which blog platform to use, you’ll want to consider your SEO and how search engine friendly each platform is.  Take a look at these 12 things to keep in mind:

1. Title Tag Customization and Rules: Unfortunately, being able to customize your title tag isn’t always built in for some blogs.
2. Static, Keyword-Rich URLs: Without a doubt, WordPress is the best choice for keyword-rich URLs if configured properly.
3. Meta Tag Customization: While not critical to search, meta tags work well with blog search engines like Technorati and help for bookmarking purposes with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.
4. Enabling Custom HTML Tags: Fortunately, all blog platforms give you the freedom to add “nofollow” to URLs that you don’t want to give outright endorsements to, and depending on the features defined in your CSS  stylesheet, you can use header tags such as H1, H2, etc.
5. Internal Anchor Text Flexibility: In order to be ‘optimized’ rather than simply search-friendly, customizing the anchor text on internal links is critical.
6. Intelligent Categorization Structure: You can specify a different URL slug for your categories and even write a description which will appear on the category pages.
7. Pagination Controls/Duplicate Content: The recommended suggestion is to use robots.txt, which is something that is only available if you host the blog yourself.
8. 301 Redirect Functionality: WordPress has its own 301 redirection plugin as well in case you are changing your file structure and have hundreds or thousands of blog posts that will need to be altered.
9. XML/RSS Pinging: Without these your blog isn’t really a blog.
10. Image Handling and ALT Tags:  WordPress gives you incredible control over ALT tags as you upload the image to the server through the software, but all other platforms make it possible through editing the code by hand.
11. CSS Exceptions: If you are hosting the blog yourself, you’ll have complete control over your stylesheet and can add any CSS rules as appropriate.  Blogger.com also features CSS control, though WordPress.com does not.
12. Static Caching Options: This is one feature that free bloggers (using Blogger, WordPress.com, or TypePad) don’t have to worry about.