Wordpress vs. Blogger

I recently asked the community of bloggers over at the Digital Point forums for their opinions on two of the leading free blogging platforms available, WordPress and Blogger. I currently use Blogger for this blog, but have heard so many good things about WordPress that I decided to find out more. And to my surprise, as a long-time Blogger user, WordPress came out way ahead in my informal poll. Here are some of the reasons provided by WordPress fans:

• WordPress offers more control over blog layout and publication settings, and there is a larger selection of user-developed features such as blog themes and plugins for WordPress than there is for Blogger.

• If you host a WordPress blog on your own domain and server, it's easy to implement Google AdSense to generate revenue from your blog. You can do this either by adding AdSense code directly to the blog template (same as you do in Blogger) or by using a special AdSense plugin.

• There is a large community of WordPress users developing custom blog themes, plugins, and other features, as well as providing support to newbie bloggers.

• SEO advantages: it's far easier to optimize a WordPress blog for search engines than it is for a Blogger site. Search optimization involves fine-tuning your blog's URLs, page titles, descriptions, headers, tags, and other key metadata to ensure it achieves a high ranking for relevant terms in search engine results. One responder noted that they'd created their blog using WordPress and never did any search optimizing on their own - but thanks to WordPress's built-in optimization features, the blog was getting over 500 hits from search engines per day within 6 months. Pretty impressive.
  
  
• One SEO feature that especially interested me is the ability to customize your permalink URLs. With Blogger, you're pretty much stuck with long, convoluted, date-stamped URLs for each post. But WordPress lets you configure these permalink URLs however you want, cutting out a lot of the extra baggage that can hurt your post's search rankings and frankly just looks weird.

• I also got the general sense that WordPress is regarded as a more professional blogging platform, and that because of its many different themes and display options, it's much easier to give your blog those little professional-looking touches than it is with Blogger.

Based on all the feedback I've received on the advantages of WordPress, I'll definitely have to give some serious thought to switching blog platforms - though I've got so much published on Blogger already it would be quite a project, but maybe worthwhile in the long run.

Got your own opinions on WordPress and Blogger? Feel free to post 'em in the comments below!