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Get the NewsletterSEO and CMS: Deployment Best Practices (Part 1)
Content management systems (CMS) place the responsibility of content creation and maintenance squarely in the hands of non-technical users. With the promise of reduced IT involvement and expenditures, the benefits of CMS are clear. Or are they?
For those leveraging Web CMS tools to manage their online content, there is a risk to be mitigated while implementing your WCM solution. In a series of two articles, we explore how a CMS deployment, without careful consideration, can have a detrimental effect on your search engine rankings and the general findability of your content.
While this two-part series does not present a “silver bullet” approach to improving your rankings on competitive search terms, it does sketch established tactics for improving your search engine visibility and strategies for enforcing these tactics during your CMS implementation.
The Contentious World of What Matters
None of the major search engines make public the algorithms they use to sift through billions of documents. As a result, just about every Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practitioner holds a different perspective on the factors that matter.
In the absence of a definitive understanding of search engine algorithms, SEO practitioners have experimented, observed, messed-with and republished web site content to try to gain insight into their inner workings.
In general, these factors can be divided into four categories:
- On-page factors
Factors that vary with each page on the site, such as the title of the page. Individual authors frequently control or influence these factors. Appropriate CMS configuration can help ensure authors follow best practices. - Site-wide factors
Issues that can be addressed for the entire site, such as the creation of a site map. Frequently, site or content management administrators can control or influence these factors. - Off-site factors
Search engines are increasingly relying on factors such as the number of external sites linking to a page and behaviour of visitors on a given site to determine rankings. CMS solutions can only address these factors tangentially. - Negative factors
A wide variety of issues can lead to search engines reducing the ranking of a page; these range from unreliable site uptime to the inappropriate use of redirects. Many of these factors can be addressed with an effective content management solution.
We'll addresses only those factors thought to influence search engine rankings that are relevant to content management deployment. For a comprehensive discussion of all search factors see Search Engine Ranking Factors available at www.seomoz.org (DOC).
The following tables are a short summary of the more comprehensive discussion available in the complete report.
Site-Wide Factors
W3C Compliant Code |
A page that is coded to match W3C XHTML standards is simpler for the search engines to parse and ensures all content is readable. |
Site Maps |
A comprehensive site map ensures that search engine spiders can find and index each page on the site by following a single link. |
Google Site Maps |
Google site maps significantly increase the likelihood of all of the content on your site being indexed by these engines. Yahoo! and MSN have also adopted Google’s standard. |
Site Navigation as Text |
Create main navigation as text links – not images – to ease the job of search engines crawling through the site. |
Use Search Engine Friendly URLs |
Avoid dynamic URLs; use static URLs. If you must use dynamic URLs, use no more than two parameters. |
Publish to a Flat Directory |
By using a relatively flat file structure – no more than two directories deep – you may be able to increase the relevance assigned to pages by some pages to search engines. |
Eliminate Broken Links |
Establish a process for finding and eliminating broken links and create a custom 404 page. Search engines may penalize sites for out-dated links. |
Appropriate Use of robots.txt |
An improperly constructed robots.txt page can prevent your site from being indexed at all. |
On-Page Factors
Effective Title Tags |
The text within the title tag of a page is one of the most important factors influencing its ranking at major search engines. |
Effective Meta Description Tags |
Every page should include a compelling description of the content of the page as a meta description. |
Reduce Code Clutter |
Eliminate extraneous HTML and JavaScript code through the use of “includes” and cascading style sheets. |
Image Alt Attributes |
Search engine spiders cannot read images, but they can parse and process the “alt attributes” associated with an image. |
Ensure Links can be Processed |
Don’t bury links inside JavaScript or Flash Macromedia. |
Avoid Spelling Errors |
Invest in a spell checking utility to improve page quality. |
Use Key Words in URLs |
The use of the search terms within a page’s URL appears to contribute to search engine ranking – include terms separated by dashes. |
Effective Content Structuring |
Make use of formal heading tags (<h1>, <h2> etc) to organize content and signify importance of specific terms. |
Use Descriptive Text in Internal Links |
Include key terms within the links that point to a page from other pages on your site. |
Negative Factors
Duplicate Content |
Ensure each page on your site is substantially different. |
Duplicate Titles |
The same title should never appear on more than one page on a site. |
Avoid Session Variables |
Avoid dynamic systems that assign a different session variable to each visitor – including search spiders. |
Canonical Issues |
Make sure that search engines do not see similar URLs (www.url.com and url.com for example) as separate pages. |
Associating with “Bad Neighbours” |
Beware linking to sites that practice underhanded search engine optimization techniques – avoid “link farms.” |
Next Week:
We'll discuss how these factors can be addressed within a CMS.
Read: SEO and CMS: Best Practices During Deployment (Part 2)
About the Author
Randy Woods is a co-founder of non-linear creations. With his breadth of knowledge and experience in online strategy, content management and search marketing, Randy shares his lessons learned through the non-linear creations Leadership Series; a number of published whitepapers including: Best Practices in CMS Governance, SEO and CMS: Best Practices and the NLC Performance Framework.
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Thanks Randy, great article. I just wanted to mention that a lot of high ranking pages do not comply with the W3C XHTML standards, even though it seems that SE will give more weigh to this fact in the future.
I also want to mention the XHTML issue. There is no difference as far as meaning is concerned if a web content is marked up with semantically appropriate and valid HTML 4.01. XHTML 1.0 is just a reformulation of HTML 4.01 as an XML application.
Thanks for the great article.
Thank you for a very interesting article. However, please note that not all CMS scripts out there have negative effect on your PR. We at WebAPP ( http://www.web-app.net ) are well aware of these issues and added special function in the language files that allows users to edit their titles, we also added functions to make the page titles dynamic.
Kind regards
WebAPP
http://www.web-app.net the best open source free CMS out there!
With Google and many of the search engines updating their algorithm to start matching phrases and keywords (for example, do a search on Google, but start your search with tilde “~” sign) my opinion is that we need to start focusing on quality writing and let the processes evolve along with the search engines. Too many are still employing SEO techniques of 5 years ago – this will not do in our Blog saturated world, and information saturated web.
The quality, informative, writing needs to start winning over the clever keyword writing. That's exactly what the search engines want… and exactly what the public — including me- want.
These tips are great.. have implemented several CMS's to several clients… These tips are like my bible.. good stuff! Thanks!
Most outsourcing companies just tell us to use CMS…period. I was never convinced because it’s like I’m letting second-hand users handle my site. After reading your post, I think I’ll look for people or group of people who know CMS just like you.
Hi Randy,
thanks for the article. I like the way you've organized it. However, be informed that a Search Optimization platform like www.seosamba.com which includes a CMS, not only handles most efficiently all of the variables you describe, but also address offsite factors! If you have multiple websites, you can produce them using www.seosamba.com and publish them on any web servers with different class C of IP's. You can also interlink all of these sites through an automated project-wide deeplinking facility, making descriptive linking across not only a single site, but all of your site in an easy automated fashion.
Michel
I suggest putting all of these in tabular form. That will make comparison in terms of the negative and positive aspects a lot easier.
Interesting post to read almost 3 years later. I agree with the posts above that we still haven't seen anything in terms of engines rewarding sites that use valid, compliant front-end code. We have, however, seen Google spam engineer Matt Cutts indicate that sites with fast load times could be rewarded in the coming months.
Overall, excellent post Randy.
One item that KILLS businesses is the issue of redirecting. Many businesses conduct site redesigns and migrate to a new CMS. Often, the vendor will not permanently redirect (via 301) the customer's old URLs to the new URLs on the new CMS, crushing existing search engine rank. As I write this and glance at Part 2 Randy wrote, he does cover 301s there. We (Bridgeline, company I work for) recently held a webinar on CMS and SEO harmony. A detailed explanation of 301 permanent redirecting can be found on our slideshare account:
http://www.slideshare.net/bridgeline/are-your-seo-strategy-and-web-cms-in-perfect-harmony