Couple questions. How large a website can WP power?

WP is simply the tool, capacity/bandwidth has more to do with your host provider.

As for SEO, although content is ultimately the most important thing regardless of what tool you use, WP will organize your content in fashion that’s easily understood by search engines.

It powers WordPress.com – So … Big ??

It powers wordpress.com so big, lol.

I’ve just read that wordpress is great for powering small business sites, suggesting that large sites would never use it.
Also Gabe, I understand about content being most important for that, but I’ve seen wordpress seo plugins of various sorts? Are those more for beginners who don’t know anything about seo, or could they benefit a larger website by more experienced webmasters as well?

cheers.

Many large sites use WordPress. SEO can be done all in your theme, or via plugins to help further optimize things. Personally, I think SEO plugins should be used when you get to the middle ground, when you know both how SEO works AND how WordPress does, so you know what you’re getting into.

I use WordPress SEO (by Yoast) on some sites that need it, others not so much.

Would you say there’s an seo benefit with wp compared to a non wp site? Or is it just the difference between automatic and manual seo work?

There’s an SEO ‘benefit’ to WordPress, as in and of itself, it’s SEO friendly, and the majority of themes are designed to work with SEO basics.

There’s always a difference between automatic and manual SEO applications, though, and much of the reason we use plugins is when we want to customize things like the title or meta excerpt, in a way different from the post title, or custom excerpt.

Also, are there seo benefits in converting a manual static website into a wordpress driven one? Does wordpress have seo benefits over non wordpress driven sites?

Just how static? Do you ever want to update it?

With good caching, you can effectively create a static version of your site, and still have the benefits of one of the best CMS’s in the world ??

I just wanted to end with saying thanks for all your answers. Very on spot.