CMS and SEO

It appears that just as I thought us SEO guys were beginning to make a breakthrough in helping people think about SEO as they plan each page of their website, along come the techies with their content management systems and pull the rug out from under our feet again.

A content management system or CMS is usually an online interface that allows you as a website owner or administrator to update your website without any technical knowledge. In some cases this might be just an updateable news page, and in others you can mess with every aspect of your website.

So what's the SEO beef with this?

Many CMS that I have seen have a neat set of three boxes that you can fill in as attributes of each page. These are usually headed SEO and allow the admin to set the page title, meta-description and meta-keywords for each page they are working on. The problem comes that many people now believe that because they've filled in these boxes, that the SEO for their site is complete. In most cases this could not be further from the truth.

Content, content, content. The most important aspect of your SEO on each page is to ensure that you include all the best related search terms in the content for that page. Not just in the text, but as headings, bold text, italic text, alt-tags and hyperlinks. You'll have to strike a balance between making the text read well on the page and including your main search terms enough times to make them worthwhile.

Hyperlinks between pages. One of the dangers when using a CMS to run your website is that you leave all the navigation in the navigation bars and never take the time to link appropriate pages within the text content. Contextual hyperlinks really do make a difference in helping boost the prominence of certain search terms on your website, so try and add them on every page that you add or edit with your CMS.

Search engine friendly URL's. Some CMS systems allow you to use a web server feature called mod_rewrite to rename the pages with search engine friendly URL's. Each time I've done it it has taken a bit of fiddling around to get working but in my mind it is an essential thing to do. URL's that have the appearance of being static often rank better than pages with dynamic URL's

The two content management systems I've used and like are Mambo for larger sites and Wordpress for blogs and small sites. Both are excellent and allow you the freedom to do these things mentioned on this page.

27-Sep-2005