If you are going to perform SEO on your website there are a number things that will make the process of doing this a lot easier

Regardless of whether or not your website has a CMS the following things will help you ensure that all aspects of your website are as SEO friendly as possible.

1. Every page of your website should have unique title tags and meta descriptions – and the tool you use to create and manage your website should enable this to be the case

2. You should also be able to specify other Meta tags such as the canonical tag or robots tag in the Head section of the site.

3. Creating a custom 404 page is important for handling any broken links on the site and you should be able to specify the contents of this page and ensure it serves a 404 header status when it is displayed – this will ensure broken links aren’t indexed in Google and will also help you run broken link checks on the site.

4. Make sure you have the ability to create a unique H1 tag for each page of the site and that any CMS you are using does not link the H1 tag and <title> tag together.

5. If you are using a shopping cart or CMS to create content you may find that you have long URLs being generated such as www.example.com/Parent/Child/Item/Default.aspx?Taxonomy,6711,List,12,CatID/333Levelj/SortField=ProductName,ProductName so make sure you are able to rewrite these URLs to be more search engine friendly.

6. If you need to rewrite URLs or have old pages from a previous version of your website you need to be able to create 301 redirects

7. Make sure you have access to the FTP of the site so that you can create and upload a robots.txt and sitemap.xml file.

8. Finally remember that Content is very important on your website, make sure that you can create new pages on your website and look into adding a blog or news service to create new pages regularly.

Although this isn’t a complete list of everything needed from an SEO point of view making sure that your website has the above functionality will make the process of increasing your website’s visibility in Google easier than if these things aren’t in place.