Wordpress

Is an entire website built with Wordpress good ? bad ? no effect ?

How easily and efficiently is Wordpress optimized ?

Its is good. But It is Blogging Environment. You should do planning with this point.

There are also a few good SEO plugins for wordpress that can help. I have used it for blogging purposes and found it useful. I have also helped build a website using Wordpress for others that wanted to try and maintain it and it was not used as a blog and it worked out fine.

I just set-up a second word press site last month. You can improve the optimization if you know how to find the files that produce the header and other components that assemble a page. You only need to edit the HTML/php statements to change the title tags, page headings and post headings for improved optimization. URLs can also be edited and a few other tweaks added. You will need to know a little CSS to make it look nice.

After that the rest is up to the links that you will receive.

A comment above said that wordpress was only for blogs. That is not true. You can change the format from "posts" to "pages" and make a website that does not have the blog-style linkage. Or you can publish in blog format and think out of the box to link the pages like a normal website.

My wordpress pages appear in the blog SERPs within twenty minutes and sometimes that fast in the webSERPs when blog posts are included.

If you have heavy linkage into the blog and publish several items per day your posts can be indexed and into the webSERPs in just a few hours.

My blog holds #1 positions for some terms that most people here would consider to be difficult.

I am with EGOL on this!!

I love Wordpress. It doesnt matter if the whole website is built in it or just one folder.

What does matter is how it's all linked up and categorised and silo'd - how it shares link equity with the rest of the site - for instance, your sales pages.

And that you are putting decent content in there.

Agreed. Wordpress is very flexible and can be used in so many different ways with so many great plugins that it is hard not to use it. It really comes back to "content is king" with good SEO in place.

Ya I tend to flip the title element around, page/post first, blog name second and hardwire @ Site Name at the end of title element and header title.

For the blog name I often look for an appealing extension to most posts... a commonly found partial phrase -- anything that is repetitively found in longtail searches.

something like ______ free advice, ______ advice, free ______ tips, ______ tips, etc. and then avoid using the phrase in the post itself - and if needed use a synonym... so a post might look like:

Child Care Services for your NewBorn Baby Advice @ Babies Tale

[Child Care Services for your NewBorn < Post Title] [Baby Advice < Blog Name] [@ Babies Tale < Hardwired Site Name]

Now I got volumes of additional phrases I can rank for.

Does Wordpress allow for certain pages to be made "static" and for other pages to be "dynamic" ?

Also, does the difference between "static" or "dynamic" pages effect indexabilty ?

It has a permalink htaccess code module that allow /title-of-post-urls/index.php which is as good as static html pages

WP rocks. If you use iis you need to do a little tweaking to get the permalinks to work correctly but it is all spelled out in WP support forums, basically just adding index.php to your permalink structure.

Also you can create static or posts pages with the click of a button. Simple. Google eats up wp content as long as you set your pinging up correctly. Anywhere from 20 minutes to a coupel hours my articles end up in blog search and many take high positions for some great traffic phrases. The templates are easy easy to set up.
For the most basic of "what you need" to make wp work look at this article. I used it to make my first wp template (granted I already had knowledge of CSS and HTML)
http://www.cypherhackz.net/archives/2006/12/13/make-your-own-wordpress-theme-part-1/

Keep in mind, Great unique content, written with the user in mind and frequent updates (1 a day is great, never can be too much). A little trick I use which I must due to the nature of most of what I write is accurate sourcing of content. When I write I include all the sources at the end of the article. It just makes sense if its based in research.

If it just an editorial then no need

Wordpress is definitely a brilliant CMS but would you use it if you wanted to have a robust shopping cart to?

You can put a cart on wordpress... no problem. I have one and it works exactly like the cart on my other sites.

Any cart recommendations for WP? It would be nice if there is an e-commerce solution for WP, that produces some good looking product / category URLS.

Yes, what cart did you find that works well?
I have searched for one. I found some mods to incorporate WordPress with ZenCart. I would rather not go that route.

example: http://www.bangalowcookingschool.com/

plugin: http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce


another example: http://www.briggs.net.nz/log/projects/yak-for-wordpress/