Why does your Content Management System (CMS) is not SEO friendly: 9 Things Your Developer didn't Tell You

Error in deserializing body of reply message for operation 'Translate'. The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 2, position 8439.
Error in deserializing body of reply message for operation 'Translate'. The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 1, position 9101.
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 pages

The 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)

Pragmatic, professional advice with no hidden agenda. 

-Mark Brownlow
Internet Business Forum

View the original article here

Help Google index your site content faster

22. October 2010, according to the posted webadvantage.net

  If you have a blog, news site or a site that publishes the dynamic content on a regular basis (or even semi-regular), you know how important it is to quickly deliver content to users and search engines would like to see it stated and read as soon as possible."Search engine to search for relevant content and publishers expect can be found on the instant, publish," says the official blog for Google. "When we find new pages, or new data to existing pages, we add these direct index. "

But instead of sitting back and waiting for Google to find content to give Google a nudge by taking a more proactive approach.Ways to help Google to find and index the content of the site faster:

    1. create a dynamic content to a fixed XML Sitemap & Google Webmaster tools to deliver .Even if your site already has a site map, you must create a separate Sitemap for your blog-and in particular the news content to Google in order to distinguish between the normal content of the site and prioritize accordingly.The other presents its own Sitemap Google Webmaster Tools. (If you are not already have a Google Webmaster Tools, we recommend signing up for a free trial account.) 

  2. Add the Google News Sitemap Generator site.  This will create a Google News Sitemap in XML format for submission to Google News automatically.Site format, depending on the purpose for which you may be able to find the extension that does this, or you can use the custom program this function.   If your site is powered by WordPress, we strongly recommend that you install this plug-in. irrespective of the method, make sure that Google's guidelines and stick to the specified format. 

  3. register your RSS feed (s) location in your Google Webmaster Tools.Be sure to register on the site RSS feed (s) of the location of the Google Webmaster tools to Google to find new content faster. it is also a good idea to check in webmaster tools on a regular basis to ensure, is not any errors or problems with the feeds and sent to the site map. 

  4. Specifies the FeedBurner account to automatically push updates to Twitter.  If you have a Twitter account and FeedBurner allows you to manage your feeds, you can publish a feed items to Twitter automatically.Because Google owns the FeedBurner and supervise new content on Twitter, it makes sense to get off to a good start streaming your content push directly for these services, if you can. FeedBurner automatically checks for updates every hour.

  5. Ping update services whenever new content is published.Most blog platforms, you can "ping" the update services such as Technorati gives them a site you have previously updated your fresh content.On the other hand, these services work with the ping command, and update their links to new content indexes.(If you have a WordPress blog, it can be configured to automatically send the ping multiple update services, options > Writing > Update Services.)If your site does not automatically do this, you can visit the Ping-o-Matic ping sent manually.

We recently tried some changes to our blog and newsroom definitions and had the opportunity to improve the Google index the time it takes for our new content — from about an hour down to 14 minutes! we use Google Alerts when I also regularly monitor the speed in which the indexing occurs. Slow Google alert or notification when new content is published on the deficiency may be a problem or signal the need to improve.

When we introduced our SEO and blog optimization, we recommend that you always ways to improve the speed of the site and to improve performance and increase visibility in search engines rankings. you want to speed up that new content may not be indexed by Google? Try implementing and monitoring the above tips to monitor the implementation of the results whenever new content is published. tell us how it goes in the comments!

Comments (1)

Pragmatic, professional advice on a hidden agenda.

-Mark Brownlow
Internet Business Forum

View the original article here

-Create content on the Pressure

Posted by Hollis Thomases 9.2002, on the 10th day 2010

  Ask your social media expert, consultant, or marketing company information through social media marketing, and they are likely to tell the contents creation. prepare yourself for the boatloadsBlog content (posts and comments), video content, Twitter content (tweets, retweets, shared links), Facebook content (Wall posts, events, photos, and more), LinkedIn content (updates, group discussions, connection requests), sharing, photo podcast content … the list is of the opinion as it could be endless. someone who, and creates the content, and shall advise the other, if possible, I'm not oblivious to the fact that is constant is the content of any thorn on the side of someone, but I am also not immune to the reasons for the creation of the contents of the pressures. 

Made is not due to an error, even though: online content, has been and is still the King.They advise others to create content will not be misguided in their documentation. more than ever people are insatiable contents of carnivores are, and they want to keep the feasting is never-ending, table, new content such as King Henry VIII hungry courtiers. There is a risk that this insatiable appetite for the creation of its own is a Beast in the belly grow increasingly.

Insatiable beast 
Image Courtesy Blizzard Entertainment 

  The more content, which may be created, the greater the pressure to create more content seems to be.  Not only it is recommended that you create content, if you want to help your own arrangement of its social media marketing objectives be achieved, it is now becoming are not suitable for classification does content creation.In other words, you Snooze, you lose.

Frequency and content of the creation of the pace has also accelerated. It may be OK to post new content at least once a month;then it came several times a month; then several times a month, and now it is almost on a daily basis, the requirement for some — even multiple times daily.Feel, such as content creation has become obsessed with, as a result of misuse of the competition, the best players will seek to require some kind of outdo allows the Crown, such as the Top Blogger or Most Prolific or even most my Life be exposed. is this obsession with healthy? it is a good marketing? if not you are trying to connect and market your own brand, is an indispensable business is the invocation of the contents of the font? It even more sense to put so much effort in the enterprise business unit, resources, and the amount of attention too abundant to create new content and could make the backlash?

I say to abide by the terms of this trend towards creating the mountains need content, wonder if an act against which an action for all of its values, or, even if they are, what tolls is exacting effort also to those who are responsible for the content within My experience?, I have seen in a different situation, at least the following:

Not harm and the benefits of:

The participants of the Conference live blogging or tweeting session within your audience;Bloggers writer's block ask Twitter universe, what they should write about with

But less useful as a matter of fact, no harm?

At the beginning of the session of the Conference participants to draw up the first leaves and post an entry in the session data (but they can be the best by leaving the earliest is left); video bloggers to explain yourself early, starting from the networking events, so they quiet mode off or leave altogether so they may carry out on-the-instant print film in their latest "Nero" post. "Content generators, participating in events is not even at all, because their content is the sole responsibility of the overwhelms them entirely for the generation of

So concluded:

Hijacked content — when other sites scrape your blog (or blog headlines RSS feed) and the house of their own sites, it is the same as your own content, and if nothing else, use it for marketing my site.

Uncredited Web Ad. vantage RSS Feed/blog content

Grab an instance of the saving grace is that, as the case may be, at least, a hijacker links back to your site (see the truly evil allows offenders to serve their sentence in the last paragraph);

The contents of a Member State to fulfil obligations — these days Unattributed, in particular in the case of Twitter is not uncommon for the contents of the original authors of tweets or completely ignore or delete of a credit institution, in which case, the poor sap can save all the time and effort in writing a piece may be initially appears not visible benefit … other traffic to their article, but then it is always possible that the article the reader doesn't connect the dots, or does not care Managers turn bad. Content of the police and the rat out the delivery of the supervisory authorities of the producers;the pressure to produce content, trumping other business priorities that would otherwise be left unattended, because the content developer struggles churn out a new song;content produced by pressures that lead them to mediocrity — too many social media content in Europe more accessible, usable pieces in these days are just useless Metallinöyhtä-a car, or "link, acceptance of bait," serving for a purpose other than to attract other linking it with the contents of the helping bring visibility within search engines

Evil:

The worst Link baited content can also house, scams, worms, viruses or other malicious postings;stolen content — Don't be surprised if you find the original content of re-published elsewhere without any credit or even a link back to the original message to the Web., it is difficult to police this too. try to make some searches for unique phrases for the content and see what comes.

What is my point? I think I am still clearly value (otherwise, why I may be writing this post, right?), the production of the contents of the roads, in order to avoid the creation of content creation belonging to pit: 's favour. [1] [2], in order to comply with the security features of the material to write good., people actually want to read and search for a good content on an ongoing basis, the value of the expression. creates a reader is reliable and that the confidence and demonstrate your expertise, can bleed a positive impact on the marketing efforts but, on the other hand, don't. irrespective of the dying, the pressure in the creation and the contents of the ridiculous äärirajat absolutely does not sacrifice your personal life to do so, you may be able to reach the conclusion that, as the case may be. Sure could be regarded as a great writer, but many of the great writer, died of a heart attack in the entire history, and the misery of Seriously rahatonta. ain't all it's a good idea.

Comments (4)

Pragmatic, professional advice on a hidden agenda.

-Mark Brownlow
Internet Business Forum

View the original article here

The Pressure to Generate Content

Posted By Hollis Thomases on Sep 10th, 2010

Ask any social media expert, consultant or marketing firm about how to market through social media, and they’re likely to tell you to get ready to generate boatloads of content.  Blog content (posts and comments), video content, Twitter content (tweets, retweets, shared links), Facebook content (Wall posts, events, photos & more), LinkedIn content (updates, Group discussions, connection requests), photo sharing content, podcast content…the list feels like it could be endless.  As someone who both generates content and advises others to do so, I’m not oblivious to the fact that not only is the constant need for content a potential thorn in someone’s side, but I’m also not immune to the pressures content creation causes.

Make no mistake, though:  Online content has been and continues to be King.  Those advising others to generate content are not misguided in their guidance.  More than ever, people are insatiable content carnivores, and they want to keep feasting at the table of never-ending, newly-created content like King Henry VIII’s hungry courtiers.  The danger is that this insatiable appetite is a beast of our own creation, and its belly is growing ever-larger.

The Insatiable Beast
Image Courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment

The more content that gets created, the greater the pressure to generate more content seems to be.   Not only is it advisable to create content if you want to help your organize reach its social media marketing goals, it’s now becoming inadvisable NOT to generate content.  In other words, you snooze, you lose.

The frequency and pace of content creation has also accelerated.  It used to be OK to post new content at least once a month; then it became several times a month; then multiple times a month and now it’s almost a daily requirement for some — even multiple times daily.  It feels like content creation has become an obsession, a competition, an addiction where the top players seek to outdo one another to claim some sort of crown like Top Blogger or Most Prolific or even Most Personal Life Exposed.  Is this obsession healthy?  Is it good marketing?  If you’re not trying to build and market a personal brand, is it necessary for a business to be a never-ending font of content?  Does it even make sense for a business to place so much company effort, resources and attention on generating overly-generous amounts of new content, and could there be a backlash from doing so?

I have to say, in observing this trend towards generating mountains of content, I do have to wonder if the efforts are all worth it or, even if they are, what tolls is the effort also exacting on those responsible for the content?  Within my own experience I have seen no less than these varying circumstances:

The benign and helpful:

Conference attendees live-blogging or -tweeting from within a session audience;Bloggers with writer’s block asking the Twitter universe what they should write about

Benign but less helpful to themselves?

Conference attendees leaving a session early to be the first to compile and post an entry about a session (but they may have missed the best part by leaving early);Video bloggers excusing themselves early from networking events so they can off to a quiet room or leave altogether so they can film their latest “genius post.”Content generators not even attending events at all because their content generation responsibility overwhelms them altogether

Not so benign:

Hijacked content — When other websites scrape your blog (or your blog headlines via your RSS feed) and house it on their own sites, making it look like it’s their own content and if nothing else, using it for their own site marketing purposes.

Uncredited Web Ad.vantage RSS Feed/Blog Content

In the hijacking instance, the saving grace is that the hijacker at least provides links back to your site (see the last section for truly evil offenders);

Unattributed content — These days, particularly on Twitter, it’s not uncommon for original authors of tweets or content to be completely bypassed or removed from receiving credit.  When this happens, the poor sap who put all the time and effort into writing a piece to begin with gets no visible benefit…other traffic coming to their article, but by then, it’s always possible that the reader of the article doesn’t connect the dots or doesn’t care.Content Managers having to play bad cop and rat out under-delivering producers to supervisors;The pressure to produce content trumping other business priorities that otherwise get left unattended as the content developer struggles to churn out a new piece;Content produced under pressure leading to mediocrity — Too many social media content pieces these days are just useless fluff or “link bait,” serving no other purpose than to entice others to link to it which in turn helps elevate the content’s visibility within the search engines

The evil:

The worst Link-baited content could also house scams, worms, viruses or other maliciously-intended postings;Stolen content — Don’t be surprised if you find your original content re-published elsewhere on the Web without any credit or even a link back to your original post.  It’s difficult to police this too.  Try doing some searches for unique phrases in your content and see what comes up.

So what’s my point?  Thought I clearly still value the production of content (why else would I be writing this post, right?), I encourage you to avoid falling into the pit of creating content for creation’s sake.  Be judicious.  Write good material that people actually want to read and find value in.  Consistently good content will generate trust in your reader and that trust and demonstrated subject matter expertise, can bleed into your marketing efforts to positive effect.  But whatever you do, don’t succumb to the pressure to generate content to ridiculous extremes and definitely don’t sacrifice your personal life to do so.  Sure, you might end up viewed as a great writer, but many a great writer throughout history died penniless and in misery.  Seriously, it ain’t worth all that.

Comments(4)

Pragmatic, professional advice with no hidden agenda. 

-Mark Brownlow
Internet Business Forum

View the original article here

Help Google Index Your Site Content Faster

Posted By WebAdvantage.net on Oct 22nd, 2010

If you have a blog, news site, or any site that publishes dynamic content on a regular (or even semi-regular) basis, you know how important it is to quickly deliver your content to users and search engines in the hopes it will be found and read as soon as possible.  “Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish,” says Google on its official blog.  “As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index.”

But instead of sitting back and waiting for Google to discover your content, give Google a nudge by taking a more proactive approach.  Here are some ways you can help Google to find and index your site content faster:

1.  Create a dedicated XML sitemap for your dynamic content & submit to Google Webmaster Tools. Even if your site already has a sitemap, you should create a separate sitemap to use specifically for your blog or news content to help Google  differentiate it from normal site content and prioritize it accordingly.  Be sure to submit your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools.  (If you’re not already using Google Webmaster tools, we strongly recommend signing up for a free account.)

2.  Add a Google News Sitemap Generator to your site. This will generate a Google News Sitemap in XML format for automatic submission to Google News.  Depending on your site’s platform, you may be able to find a plug-in that does this, or you can custom program this functionality.   If your site is powered by WordPress, we recommend this plug-in.  Whatever method you use, make sure to follow Google’s guidelines and adhere to their specified format.

3.  Register the location of your RSS feed(s) in Google Webmaster Tools. Be sure to register the location of your site’s RSS feed(s) in Google Webmaster Tools to help Google discover new content faster.  It’s also a good idea to check Webmaster Tools periodically to ensure there are no errors or issues with your submitted feeds and sitemaps.

4.  Set up a FeedBurner account to automatically push updates to Twitter. If you have a Twitter account and use FeedBurner to manage your feeds, you can automatically publish feed items on Twitter.  Since Google owns FeedBurner and monitors the Twitter data stream for new content, it makes good sense to push your content directly into these services if you can.  FeedBurner will automatically check for updates each hour.

5. Ping update services whenever new content is published. Most blog platforms enable you to “ping” update services like Technorati to let them know you’ve updated your site with fresh content.  In turn, these services will process the ping and update their indices with links to your new content.   (If you have a WordPress blog, it can be configured to automatically send pings to multiple update services in Settings > Writing > Update Services.)  If your site does not do this automatically, you can visit Ping-o-Matic to manually send pings.

We recently experimented with some changes to our blog and newsroom configurations and were able to improve the time it takes for Google to index our new content—from approximately one hour down to 14 minutes!  We also regularly use  Google Alerts to help monitor the speed at which the indexing process occurs.  A slow Google Alert or a lack of alert when new content is published could be indicative of a problem or signal a need for improvement.

When we do SEO and blog optimization for our clients, we always recommend ways to improve site speed and performance to improve rankings and increase visibility in search engines.  Want to improve the speed at which your new content gets indexed by Google? Try implementing the above tips and monitoring the results whenever new content is published.  Tell us how it goes in the comments!

Comments(1)

Pragmatic, professional advice with no hidden agenda. 

-Mark Brownlow
Internet Business Forum

View the original article here

Why Your Content Management System (CMS) Isn’t SEO-Friendly: 9 Things Your Developer Didn’t Tell You

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 pages

The 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)

Pragmatic, professional advice with no hidden agenda. 

-Mark Brownlow
Internet Business Forum

View the original article here