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Posted By WebAdvantage.net on Sep 27th, 2010
Here’s the scenario: Your company just paid a developer a fortune to build a shiny new website with a content management system (CMS) and lots of great-looking pages. Life is good…until the day you decide you want to do search engine optimization (SEO). You find out that your CMS is “not SEO-friendly,” and suddenly you’re getting an education about a whole host of problems you never knew existed. Why? Because your web developer failed to mention (or were ignorant to) the constraints of your CMS with respect to SEO.
As a search engine optimization agency, it’s a scenario we’ve seen over and over again. Here are nine things your developer may not have told you about about your website’s CMS:
1. “It lacks basic SEO requirements.” Believe it or not, there are still content management systems out there (and lots of them) that do not offer even the most basic requirements for SEO. Most of the SEO-unfriendly CMSs we’ve come across lack SEO support altogether or include it only at an additional—and often exorbitant—cost. Your CMS is not SEO-friendly if you…
Have no control over page titles and meta tagsCannot modify H1 headingsCannot add alt tags to your imagesCannot customize pages independently of all other pagesThe above is by no means a complete list, but if you’ve read this far and have already identified one or more of the above issues with your CMS, run away from it! In fact, don’t even bother reading the rest of this post.
2. “It doesn’t generate clean, SEO-friendly URLs.” We’re listing this SEO requirement separately, because it’s a big one. Page URLs are one of the most important elements to optimize for search engines. Search engines like Google place a lot of weight on URLs in ranking algorithms, and therefore, it is preferable for URLs to be completely customizable. Unfortunately, there are many CMSs that won’t allow you to do this. Ideally, the URL should be both “human-friendly” and search engine-friendly. It should accurately represent the page’s content, contain related keywords separated by hyphens, and be free of unnecessary clutter.
All too often we see CMSs that generate excessively long, practically unreadable URLs that contain virtual or unnecessary sub-folders, session ID variables, and other code oddities where simpler text would suffice. Example:
In many cases, the generation of such undesirable URLs is hard-coded by the CMS and cannot be modified at all. We’ve also seen CMSs that completely duplicate every URL, generating both an “ugly” version (containing mostly numbers) and a “pretty” version (containing keywords) without a built-in requisite to force one over the other, creating a duplicate content issue. Which is a nice segue into our next point…
3. “It has duplicate content issues.” Duplicate content is one of the biggest SEO sins to commit. As we mentioned above, we’ve seen CMSs that generate multiple URLs all containing the same content. Some CMSs also generate “print-friendly” URLs that contain additional duplicate content. In these cases, extra care needs to be taken to specify canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content being “discovered” be search engines at multiple locations. On the more shameful end of the spectrum, we’ve seen CMSs tailored to specific industries that push generic, non-unique, template-based content through a feed and replicate it across all the websites they power (the real estate, automobile dealership and healthcare industries are ripe examples).
4. “The page hierarchy is flat.” Your site’s hierarchy—that is, how your navigation and pages are organized — plays a large role in how search engine crawlers sift through, prioritize, and categorize site content. A well-structured site that is organized into logical directories helps search engines distinguish between your most important, top-level content and less-relevant,deeper, sub-content. We’ve encountered some CMSs that have no hierarchy, where all pages are created and stored in the website’s root directory without the ability to modify. Your CMS should facilitate the creation of at least one level of sub-folders, to provide “depth” and better hierarchical organization of site content.
5. “It generates a ton of dynamic content.” Dynamic content refers to frequently-changing website content that is generated and served on-the-fly. Such ever-changing content is generally considered more engaging to a visitor because it’s kept fresh. In this context, dynamic content doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, does it? Unfortunately, when it comes to SEO, too much dynamic content does not necessarily equate to a good thing when there’s so much dynamic components to a page that there’s no static “anchor material” for which the search engine spider to index. Dynamic content works best when it’s only a portion of an otherwise static page, not the entire page. Make sure your CMS is capable of striking a good balance between static and dynamic content.
6. “It’s slow-loading and generates sloppy source code.” Do your website pages seem to take forever to load? Is your site’s source code mired in Javascript, Flash or code that isn’t compliant with web standards? Your CMS may itself be contributing to the problem or suffering performance issues due to a site design that relies too heavily on the use of Flash and Javascript. Some CMSs are simply inefficient, run slowly and cannot manage high peaks in site traffic. Others may generate cumbersome code that search engine crawlers stumble over. Whatever the case may be, speed definitely matters when it comes to SEO…and a slow-loading or hard-to-crawl site can adversely affect your site’s search rankings.
7. “It doesn’t play nicely with other CMSs.” Some clients have come to us with large, complex sites powered by multiple CMSs that each do their individual job well, but aren’t necessarily compatible when it comes to SEO. For example, we’ve worked with some sites that have one CMS powering e-commerce, and a different CMS powering blog content. When multiple CMSs are in play, it’s important that each one be SEO-friendly, independently configurable, and not override or work against each other.
8. “It’s so custom, it’s not even a CMS!” Sadly, we see this a lot: CMSs that are so custom they can hardly be called a content management system. A content management system should help you manage your content (duh, right?). The whole idea behind having a CMS in place to begin with is to make your website easier to manage. That’s why it pains us when we see clients stuck with complicated, over-customized CMSs that practically demand additional assistance from the developer(s) who created it. If you have a custom CMS and plan to do SEO, your ability to implement SEO in house may be severely limited.
9. “You can make SEO changes to your website…but it’ll cost ya.” Implementing SEO requires making many changes to a number of different aspects of your website. If your site uses a CMS that you don’t have full control over, or one that requires additional development costs every time you need to make even the simplest of SEO-related changes, you should seriously consider other options. After all, a CMS is supposed to save you money by reducing development costs! Before starting SEO, make sure you have a CMS that won’t bear you that much in additional cost to implement SEO changes—or else, budget for them accordingly.
The above examples are actual issues we’ve encountered when assessing our client’s content management systems prior to starting SEO. We always recommend CMS due diligence and a thorough analysis of a website’s back end before engaging in SEO to identify and address issues that would ultimately impede optimization.
Comments(1)-Mark Brownlow
Pragmatic, professional advice with no hidden agenda.
Internet Business Forum
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