Spare a moment for WordPress, and the virtues of WordPress.org over WordPress.com. Didn’t know there was much difference? According to a blog by SEO consultant Tom Dupuis at Online Media Masters, marketers should prefer the .org incantation of WordPress over its  .com counterpart.

What’s the difference?

In a nutshell, WordPress.com offers you an out-of-the-box blog that you can use to start creating content, virtually instantly. After you sign up, for free, you instantly get a set of templates to play with and a domain in the form of a .wordpress.com address.

WordPress.org, on the other hand, is a tad more complex, and requires you to download and install the WordPress environment to a host and site that you have established separately. Although you might want to choose a WordPress theme, the .org variety lets you tinker a lot more and install your own PHP or CSS style sheets. Crucially, WordPress.org is vastly more compliant with the multitude of plug-ins and SEO tools that are available – in many instances, for free – to add to your blog.

Why .org, not .com?

According to this post by SEO expert Ashley Irving, WordPress.org is better at SEO for several reasons.

– WordPress.org will support social plug-ins, such as DiggDigg and Shareholic. These are essentially those toolbars that blogs use to make social sharing easier.

In one tap/click, your readers can easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

– Better analytics data. Thanks to Google Adsense and Yoast plug-ins, WordPress.org allows you greater insight into how your pages appear on Google searches and the terms that people use to find your site.

– YARPP, the plug-in otherwise known as Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. This tool, again supported by WordPress.org, is great at serving up, you guessed it, related content. Google’s SEO master Matt Cutts explains how this is good for SEO: