Wed, 21 May 2008 16:42:46 by Joe Bursell
Many CMS' do not allow the level of manipulation and editing necessary for website search engine optimisation. This is not a criticism of CMS developers, it's just that there are so many factors to consider when building a CMS that the SEO-friendly components are sometimes overlooked.
The benefits of building an SEO friendly CMS are three-fold:
1. SEO is a continually growing area- building SEO friendly websites improves your profile
2. Once the key topics are understood you can apply them to other sites in your portfolio
3. The client gets a search-ready site from the off
So, by referring to this wish-list, and implementing its recommendations, you will be able to build an even better CMS.
1. Allow the addition/inclusion of pages
This might seem obvious, but it is something that allows an optimiser to specify non-standard pages, such as:
*Custom 404 error page
*Links pages that are used for linking and presenting links
*Sitemap page
These help increase search visibility and reduce bounce rates
2. Force the inclusion of additional pages to sites' navigation and architecture
Adding pages is one thing, but being able to add them and specify how they fit within the rest of the site is another. By using a site structure template and forcing new pages to sit in a choice of parent or child folders will avoid orphaning.
Similarly, when a page is added it should force the user to specify how other pages in the site link to it- so that a new page will create a site-link in the desired navigation menu.
3. Allow all pages, no matter where in the hierarchy, to be editable
Often top level pages have no provision for content editing. As the homepage is the most important site page for optimisation it should be wholly editable. This is also applies to pages such as "about us" and "contact".
4. Make provision for meta editing
Elements within the <head></head> such as:
meta name="Description"
meta name="Keywords"
meta name="robots"
meta name="geo.position"
meta name="geo.region"
meta name="geo.country"
meta name="geo.placename"
meta name="ICBM"
...should be available for editing. They allow us to control how a site is crawled, what search snippet is served, local SEO etc.
The <title></title> tag must also be free for editing.
4. Allow unique page meta editing
Allowing each and every page to have its meta uniquely specified means that there is much more control and customization available to us in how we describe a page to the search engines. Uniformity in the case of meta is not always desirable.
More importantly though the <title></title> tag should never be dependant on any other element. In many cases the <title></title> is forced by the page/file name- or by some on-page content, or the page's URL is dependant on the title. This causes problems as an optimised title may not always make a good URL etc.
5. Allow URL rewriting
Every page should be unique, and so should its URL. If the CMS forces a URL that is created from elements such as the <title></title> or some predefined criteria then it can be a time consuming task to use a 3rd party plugin to allow URL rewriting.
Often CMS' spew out URLs such as:
www.example.com/Parent/Child/Item/Default.aspx?Taxonomy
6711,List,12,CatID/333Levelj,SortField=etcetcetc
...which is verbose and of no real practical search value.
With a good CMS this may well be the URL that is generated, but being able to specify the URL that is used we could simplify it so that it becomes much more SEO-friendly:
www.example.com/usb-gizmos-idealgadget
6. Unique URLs
This point is closely related to "URL rewriting".
Prevent the CMS from allowing URL sharing. Any page that shares the same URL as another is likely to incur a type of penalty from the search engines- preventing it from performing well in search.
7. Allow the editing of important mark-up/code per page
Mark-up tags such as <strong>/<b>, and more importantly <h1><h2><h3> etc. should be provided as a pick-and-mix option for content.
Rather than always forcing where these tags are applied on-page, or it should be the users/editors choice as to which content they should be applied to. Search engines use them as a cue to assess the relative importance of content within a page, so if they are judiciously applied they add value.
Note: when making provision for the <h1> tag, never allow it to be used more than ONCE on a page. <h2><h3> etc. can have multiple instances.
8. Allow for editing of footers and footer links
By making footers editable you provide the opportunity to increase site interlinking, and increase the prominence of select keywords.
Joe Bursell
Campaign Delivery Manager |
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