How does efficient content management influences SEO
Online marketing today is incomplete without search engine optimisation (SEO)
, and its only logical. How can people approach you if they don't know that you exist? It's like expecting guests home without inviting them in the first place! But you are not reading this to know what is the relevance of SEO. You want to know how your content management system (CMS) can be used efficiently to improve your SEO.
First of all, why is CMS important in SEO? With all due respect to the graphics and links on a web page, SEO has always been about content in a website. For better search engine visibility as well as increased number of visitors, unique and interesting content that is constantly updated is a must for any website.
There are several factors that you consider when you prefer one CMS to the others. The cost of the CMS, the time it takes to be implemented, its built-in features, potential for customisation and finally its reliability. An often over-looked factor is its SEO friendliness. A CMS of a website can have a crucial role in its ranking, either taking it up or bringing it down.
When you evaluate a CMS from the SEO perspective there are certain factors that you need to consider. Let's check out a few of them.
URLs
SEO friendly URLs are those that describe what the content in that page is about. In other words, they are easy to understand for both search engines as well as the human visitors. An example of such a URL is somesites.com/forums.php where it is easy to make out what the page contains. For this reason they are quite search engine friendly.
See the URL somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date.
It is definitely not easy to understand what this URL contains, and such a website often sends a red signal to the search engines. These URLs are created mainly because the content that they contain are created dynamically. This is commonly seen in the case of shopping sites that contain hundreds or thousands of product pages that are difficult to create with static URLs. The CMS is often made to generate dynamic URLs and content.
What you can do
o Choose a CMS that can support search engine friendly URLs.
o Check out the other websites that use the same CMS and check their internal links. Make sure that these links are self-descriptive.
o Make sure that the CMS uses proper URL-rewrite techniques to make the URLs SEO-friendly.
Meta tags
Meta tag describes the content in the web page that search engines use to index the page. It is given near the top of the HTML as a part of the heading. The meta tags that influence the search engine ranking of the page are the keyword meta tags that lists the words or phrases that best describe the content of the page and the description meta tags that describe in one or two sentences the content. Search engines use both these meta tags to add pages to their index.
With a content management system, controlling or editing a meta tag can be quite tricky. In the case of static URLs this is easy as each page is a separate file and can be edited in a notepad. However, a CMS generates the dynamical contents of the page, often creating duplicate content in the process.
What you can do
o Make sure that you choose a CMS where you can manage the page title tag, meta description and meta keywords for each page.
Placement of the content and its style definitions
If you are a webmaster you'd know by now that search engines read a page from top to bottom. Therefore, the higher the real content lies in the page, the better. However, in the case of CMS, since the content is generated automatically, there might be many lines of Javascript or style definitions in the HTML codes before the real content. This could alienate the search engines as it takes time for them to find something substantial in your website.
What you can do
o Check whether the CMS you've chosen supports cascading style sheets.
o Make sure that the javascript and style definitions are not given at the top of the page and are given as a separate file. You could check the source file of other websites that use the same CMS and confirm this.
Code clutters and WYSIWYGs
When the fonts and colours used in a web page are defined within the HTML code of the text page, it messes up the code again repelling the search engines. CMS often contain WYSIWYG editors that often clutter the content and render repeated definitions in the page.
Readability is one of the most important factors that can increase the SEO friendliness of a page. A CMS that supports CSS can eliminate all the clutter in the codes in a page and makes it more readable to the search engines. Also, disabling the font definitions in the WYSIWYG editor has another advantage which is that your content providers cannot change or manipulate the font or colour and will conform to the definitions set by the designers and use the pre-defined headers like H1, H2, H3, etc.
What you can do
o Check whether your next CMS can support cascading style sheets
o Disable the font definitions in the WYSIWYG editors
Compliance with W3C
If the HTML codes in your websites are not compliant with the W3C standards, they might not be 100% valid, and this can actually affect the search engine ranking. This happens when the code misses a few HTML tags or use incorrect or outdated tags. Such discrepancies often make it difficult for the search engines to crawl and thus affect the rankings.
What you can do
o Choose a CMS that limits the control that content contributors have to make structural changes to the pages and the template. Or, make sure that such control is given only to the webmasters and website designers.
o Select a CMS that comes with utilities that enable code validation.
o If there is no code validation utility in the CMS, make sure the content writers use a third party tool to validate the HTML of the page before uploading the content.
Sitemap creation
The presence of a sitemap can facilitate the crawling for the search engines. Otherwise, if your HTML is ill-structured or messy or if it has a slow loading time, search engines might not crawl the site completely due to which your site might lose its ranking.
The best way here to notify the search engines of all the pages in your website is to create a sitemap. Most of the CMS now has the utility of generating sitemaps.
What you can do
o Select a CMS that can generate sitemaps for your website.
o Create a sitemap by yourself with a link from the index page that has text "sitemap".
Alt tags
As you know, search engines do not crawl images or Flash files. However, if you provide image alt tags and descriptive filenames to the images in your web pages, search engines can read them and determine the relevancy of the images. And if the image is a link, adding a text description of the landing page can influence the
SEO.
What you can do
o Choose a CMS that lets your content writers provide alt tags and file names for images.
o Provide adequate training for content writers to label the images correctly, inserting the keywords and naming them .jpg.
Running the spell check
Spelling check is a highly important but often ignored part of content creation in a website. While using a content management system to generate content, it is natural to have spelling errors which could actually affect the crawling of the search enignes. Spelling errors can occur not only in the body text but also in the ALT and title attributes, anchor texts, internal and external links, etc. It would be stating the obvious to mention how much such errors can cost to your ranking and visibility.
Other than creating a negative impression on the human visitors, spelling errors would also effect the search engine ranking as most of the search engines like Google and Yahoo now provide the right word suggestions with the "Did you mean" link for the mispelled words. Records show that about 75% of the visitors click on this "Did you mean" leaving behind just the remaining 25% visitors who may or may not visit your website.
What you can do
o Check the content of the websites that use the same CMS that you have selected and ensure that their content is free from errors.
o Ensure that your content writers do a thorough spellcheck before uploading the page.
A quality CMS can do wonders for your website both in terms of ranking as well as visitors. Webmasters often overlook the importance of good content, inserting it at the right places and checking the quality of the work of the content providers. A good content management system specially built with SEO in mind can make a big difference to your ranking and number of visitors and, in the long run, your sales.
How does efficient content management influences SEO
By: Aravind Ramesh
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