1 – Is there any advantage to SEO installing a blog on an existing site or to design a site entirely on the WordPress platform?
2 – What are some critical steps that must be addressed to make sure your blog install is SEO friendly i.e. duplicate content issue, indexing issues, etc.
Hi Zachary,
Strictly speaking, that’s two questions, but I’ll cut you some slack. Especially since I’m about a month late replying 
There’s no big SEO advantage to building your entire site on WordPress. There are, however, a lot of big advantages as far as ease of maintenance and other marketing issues. First, the person maintaining the site can maintain everything using WordPress. Second, you can control the entire site’s domain using WordPress themes. Third, you can apply plugins site-wide.
As far as critical steps, here are my big ones. I’ll be expanding on this in the Fat Free Guide shortly:
- Don’t show full posts on category pages or on your home page. That’ll create duplication.
- Don’t use pagination of any kind. It’s an SEO nightmare.
- Keep your tag taxonomy small – no more than 10-20 tags site-wide. That’ll keep you from leaking PageRank if you use a tag cloud or something similar.
- Be sure you can customize title and description tags.
- Don’t create too many categories. Try to keep it to 4-6. That’s good for SEO and better for your users.
- And obviously, make sure it’s easy to share your content via social media. That’ll boost SEO, as well.
- Of course, do all the standard site best practices as far as canonicalization.
Hope this helps,
Ian
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