Is there a comparison of the SEO capabilities of different blogging software/blogging plugins? I'd like things to be as optimised as possible.
I have a basic grasp of SEO principles, probably 12-24 months old.
I'm about to start a blog, after having a few previously.
Also, I'm not up to speed on what pings are in the blogging world. What are they, and how do they work?
I assume it is best to have blogging software that automatically pings.
SEO is a practice not an application feature. And it's not even entirely something that just your CMS would be involved with in the first place.
Is there something more specific you're concerned about that could be addressed more directly? This question's incredibly wide. Any CMS worth serious consideration should be perfectly capable of handling anything you may need to do on-site for SEO, either via core features and templating or maybe an already well-known plugin if it needs to be bolted on.
As examples, Movable Type has very few plugins that would be considered as being "SEO-related" because most of the things that would entail are in its paradigm just handled via template modifications. WordPress has probably hundreds of them(literally), meaning any significant comparison table would be near-useless just because of its mass, and because there are a few obvious front-runners in use like the all-in-one pack, platinum pack, and Yoast's, that mostly do the same things but in slightly different ways or interfaces.
Everyone will say Wordpress for this and they are right. Look at this blog post by Joost de Valk who wrote the book on optimizing Wordpress. I saw him at a conference recently and he was very good:
I did a quick Google search and didn't see any comparisons of blogging software for SE friendliness. But Wordpress is definitely built to be search engine friendly and can be made even more so using a wide variety of plugins.
If you want to know more about Pinging read these two questions:
What do Trackbacks and Pingbacks do?
Does pinging the page on social bookmarking sites whre your site has been bookmarked help SEO?
When it comes to SEO friendly platforms for blogging Wordpress is by far the best and easiest to use for a beginner.
It's important to understand that the only way in which a blogging platform supports SEO is through the technical aspects of it, e.g., URL structure, title structure, meta use, automatice sitemap creation, etc.
In all of those areas Wordpress has some great features and plugins, but in the end you'll also need to support this with great content.
The real SEO benefit in using WordPress as your blogging software, is the built-in syndicated RSS feed. It also has the ability to ping the search engines and blogosphere with each new post. With all techno jargon aside, it means telling the search engines to come and spider your blog with each and every new post you make.
Fact of the matter is, my research shows that blogs – even new ones – tend to get spidered within two to five hours of posting. (No wonder Google recommends blogging.) Adding a new web page to a normal website, may take up to seven days to get spidered, even with two decently ranked PR4 pages pointing at it.
