Let’s say you want to bake a cake. Before you do, you need to buy a cake ring. You conduct a quick search on the Web and find two different merchants at two different domains offering just what you need. Here are the URLs of the two product pages you found:
Later, your daughter needs some help with her homework assignment on global warming, so you help her to search current news stories about the issue. You find two very useful articles from two separate publications at these URLs:
In both the preceding cases, the URLs were automatically generated by the website owner’s content management system (CMS).
Both in e-commerce and in publishing, there’s a world of difference between search-friendly URLs (which, by the way, just so happen to be user-friendly as well) and a gobbledygook alphabet soup that will click through to the right page, but has none of the benefits that a simplified URL structure confers to search engine spiders and actual human beings alike.
Generating URLs is only part of the functionality of a CMS. Effectively, a CMS houses the structure and templates of a website, thus enabling a user, or group of users, to input content with relatively little skill, coding ability, or technical knowledge.
A properly chosen and configured CMS can address both site-wide and individual page issues that affect search engines’ capability to effectively find, crawl, and index a website. Although SEO considerations are one of many factors that go into the selection and configuration of a CMS, it’s important to bear them in mind if SEO is a priority.
In addition to generating search engine-friendly static URLs, other site-wide SEO considerations in selecting and configuring a CMS include the following:
• Managing dynamic URLs—Although static URLS are preferable from the standpoint of search engines, for some sites, dynamic URLs are inevitable. This is particularly true for internal site pages that are generated on-the-fly as the result of a site search (for example, “plaid winter coat”). CMS systems can be configured to generate friendlier-looking alias URLs for these dynamic pages.
• Site map—This is used to help crawlers find all content on the website, accessible via a single link. Most CMS systems can automatically generate a site map.
• Text navigation—This ensures that the main site navigation is rendered in text rather than graphically to aid crawlers.
• Flat navigation—Constructing directories no more than two or three levels deep can help search engines to assign more import to pages that aren’t “buried” in the site. An example of this might be domain.com/televisions/Sony/ModelNumber as opposed to: domain.com/televisions/color/flatscreen/plasma/32”/Sony/ModelNumber
• Manage broken links—Broken or outdated internal links are a road to nowhere for crawlers, and can lead to reduced search engine rankings site-wide. Links must convey relevance, not dead ends. Therefore, a CMS should have a process in place for finding and eliminating broken links, as well as custom 404 (error) pages.
On-page optimization factors in a CMS include the following:
• Meaningful title tags—If you’re publishing an article about global warming, “update_storm_over_globalwarming” is a fantastic title tag for the page, for both the user and the search engine crawler. For reasons that by now should be patently obvious, “story.mpl/front/5736103.html” is anything but a desirable page title. The text in a title tag is one of the single most important factors in ranking; thus, this function should be deemed mission critical.
• Effective meta tags and descriptors—Meta tags and descriptors (see Truth 18, “The relative importance of meta tags”) provide search engines with the descriptive data that describes a page’s content in search engine results, as well as supply other descriptive keywords and phrases. Some CMS systems are configured to generate this information automatically; others enable users to create and input the descriptors. Either way, meta data is a highly important component of any CMS.
• Alt attributes—Search engine crawlers can’t read graphics, photos, movies, or audio files, but they can understand the “alt attributes” associated with such content. A CMS should ensure that nontext elements are properly labeled.
• Clean and lean code—Cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript templates eliminate the need for top-heavy coding on pages, making meaty, relevant content information and links easier for crawlers to find and index.
• Spell check—Spelling errors aren’t just unprofessional and sloppy looking to human users, but they’re confusing to search engines, too.
All content management systems aren’t created equal, particularly when it comes to search engine optimization—and price isn’t a determinant. Some of the costliest commercial CMS packages are all but useless when it comes to SEO, whereas some of the search-friendliest CMSs are absolutely free blog platforms.
Does SEO matter to you? If so, then choose your CMS wisely.