One of the most important factors of running a good SEO campaign is the ability to react to competitors, search engine algorithm changes and the search habits of your target audience.
This means you need to be able to update your site on a regular basis – keep it static and you’ll be left behind.
This isn’t a problem for smaller sites that rely on making changes via FTP access. But it can sometimes be a struggle to make changes to a site that’s updated on a content management system (CMS), especially when developers insist on keeping key information like FTP details secret (yes, it happens).
The result is that SEO changes end up costing you in ‘development time’. In-house developers will have to find time to make the changes, while an external developer will probably make a charge – even for very simple jobs like uploading a .txt file.
If you are planning on commissioning or updating a customised CMS, there are many features you that can make it ‘SEO-friendly’.
Here are 3 less-obvious SEO features that you might want to consider for your CMS:
1. 301 redirects
When you delete a page or change a URL thus creating a broken link, the CMS should tell you so and offer the option of setting up a 301 redirect to another relevant page if one exists.
2. File types
As well as creating web pages, your CMS should also allow you to upload files like .xml and .txt files and then choose where they sit in the site’s hierarchy. That way you can easily keep you sitemap.xml and robots.txt files up to date.
You’ll also easily be able to add verification files, like the files needed for Google Webmaster Tools giving you or your SEO consultant access to more data about your site.
3. Meta editing
As well as the ability to manually edit title tags, you should also have access to a page’s meta data (the elements within the <head> tags).
For example:
meta name=”"Description”
meta name=”robots”
meta name=”geo.position”
This will also allow you to easily add and amend meta data that can help your SEO campaign, such as adding the canonical tag or asking search engines not to index a page.
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