We actually use the WordPress platform ourselves - it’s pretty darned good. If you host it on your own site it’s great from a customisation perspective. Yes, there’s limitations, but you can choose to either work within those limitations, or you can blast them to smithereens with good code. We started with blasting, but since chose to go for a more straightforward approach - treating WordPress as a blogging platform, and leaving the heavy lifting websites to the big CMS systems. Seems to be simpler that way.

So what does this mean? Well it shows the power of a:having what’s considered a trusted site with no spam, a long history, and plenty of content and b:the benefit of structuring things correctly. It also shows that for surprisingly large niches there’s still plenty of organic SEO capacity available.

Ok, now you may well be asking what on earth this is about. Why would I be writing about Halton Bathrooms on a blog that’s mostly devoted to my motorsport and travel stories?

Well, it’s an experiment. There’s actually a company in the area called Halton Bathrooms and Kitchens. Jolly nice bunch they are too - in fact, they did my bathroom. But it’s not really about them. It’s about seeing what the search engines think about my website.

WordPress.com and the badminton club

Basically it all started a couple of weeks ago when I helped a badminton club which I play with sometimes to get themselves a website. They don’t have much money, so I suggested a freebie site with WordPress.com, and off they went. Simple, free, and quick to do. I also wrote a quick feature about it on this site, in order to promote their activities a little and to get the search engines to pick up the link.

And that’s where it gets weird. Try searching for Halton Badminton on Google (you can just click that link there) and this site comes up top at the moment. The WordPress.com site comes nowhere.

So what’ll happen if you search for Halton Bathrooms soon? Will you find their site, or this one first? Where will I come on the listings? What about Widnes Bathrooms? Or Runcorn Bathrooms?

It’s actually, I guess, an exercise in how a website becomes important. This one’s been going for years, is well structured, and probably has hundreds of quality links coming in - including two from Wikipedia. And given that my job is running a web design company over in Liverpool (well I might as well link that too!) I and my colleague James should know a thing or two about how to make a page get picked up by the search engines.

I’ll post a little more in here, on this post, in about a week when I know what Google’s done to it. If it has, I can see quite a few technological asides about things we’re trying to do appearing in here.

A recent example of this is one of my preferred Badminton Clubs’ website - my company builds websites professionally, so we’re not in the habit of giving them away. But these are custom jobs, for firms that need reliable websites which often generate far more money than they cost. But a small club doesn’t need the fine control of a commercial organisation. So I pointed Halton Badminton’s chief chap Bob Redmond, to wordpress.com and we spent a couple of hours together as I showed him the ropes.

And now the site’s there and the search engines will soon pick it up. Hopefully it’ll soon attract the traffic it deserves - these are great clubs for anyone interested in badminton around Widnes, Runcorn or St Helens - and a fair few folk from Warrington turn up as well. For more details head to http://haltonbadminton.wordpress.com