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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.
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