WordPress or Blogger.com which one is better to run your blog on and why? Yesterday I showed users interested in starting their own blog just how easy it is to get their own blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Now the question is which is better? A self hosted WordPress blog or a Blogger.com blog?

Since my article on starting your own blog the question arise what would be better, hosting your own WordPress blog or making use of Blogger.com.

Firstly I would like to point out the fact that hosting your own WordPress blog will cost you a small fee every month due to the fact that you will have to register a domain for your blog and buy web hosting to host your WordPress blog at. These requirements are not needed when using a Blogger.com blog, Blogger.com will host your blog for you for free and you will get a free sub domain like http://igeek-howtostartablog.blogspot.com you can also register your own domain for use with Blogger.com

Installation

When it comes to installation Blogger.com makes it fairly simple and straight forward as there is no downloading or FTP of files needed, just simply click click click and you are up and running. But WordPress is not that difficult to install either, and is actually well known for its 5 minute installation, only extra steps required is uploading the WordPress files to your web host and following the on screen easy to use installation.

Customization

This is where Blogger.com lacks far behind a WordPress installation, both Blogger.com and WordPress allows for customization of themes but when it comes to stock standard working out of the box themes, WordPress trumps Blogger.com. WordPress literally has hundreds of thousand if not millions of free downloadable themes to use as you please, then there is also the nice premium themes that gets designed by companies like WooThemes.

WordPress also allows the use of static pages, something I believe Blogger.com is not capable of. Then there is all the available WordPress plugins out there, anything you can think of will most likely be there already, enabling you to make your blog as personal as you would like.

Comments

The more popular your blog becomes the more people will start commenting and interacting with your posts, and this is where spammers takes their chances to get in on the link juice. Good news is that WordPress comes stock standard with a comment spam filtering system called Akismet, something I believe Blogger.com does not have. This comes in real handy when your blog becomes more and more popular and you start to get allot of comments on a daily basis.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is what makes your blog rank higher on Google searches than that of other blogs and sites out there.

This is where WordPress outshines Blogger.com, some may disagree and say but Google own Blogger.com and who better to understand SEO than Google? Fact is for me WordPress is more customizable when it comes to SEO friendliness with simply the activation of a plugin here and a minor modification to the WordPress settings there.

Blogger.com also allows for changing the SEO friendliness of your blog, but be prepared to dig a little deeper in finding and installing these types of plugins.

Conclusion

If you are serious about making it big in the blog world I would say go straight for a WordPress installation and spare yourself the hassle of converting your Blogger.com blog to a WordPress blog later on. However if you would just like to write a daily diary for a few close friends stick to Blogger.com, but if your aspirations are to make it big in the blogging arena and have a popular blog with thousands of visitors a day and making you allot of money then go straight for WordPress.

Check back soon as I will be doing a article soon about how to setup your own WordPress blog as well as some other nice blogging tips and tricks to help  get your blog more recognised. You can also follow me on twitter to stay up to date with the latest happenings.