As stated in many previous Blogs, content is King in the SEO world. But how does a company enable people with no HTML or programming knowledge to regularly update their website?
The answer; through a content management system (CMS)
Content management systems do provide some great benefits including the ability to easily update content, which as we all know is very important to SEO. During my time here at Just Search I have come across many websites utilising CMS systems, and many websites which have incorporated CMS systems after being built, so members of staff can add content easily.
Most people however don't look at the SEO perspective of CMS systems before purchasing them. If your CMS system doesn’t generate search engine friendly pages, with optimised content, you risk the chance of losing your organic search traffic. This in turn could have a drastic effect on your conversions hence your online business.
Recently I have worked with a CMS system which supplied three boxes labeled SEO, where users can fill in their Title, Meta description and keywords for each page. I have found this to be common place within many CMS systems. The problem is many people believe that after they have filled in these boxes the SEO for their site is complete!
What they tend to forget is one of the most important factors in SEO is including your best industry search terms in your content, navigation and headings. Most CMS systems tend to have a set navigation which users will not be able to change, this hampers SEO professionals as they cannot change your internal link navigation to improve your SEO.
In addition most companies don’t have any SEO experience, and therefore do not know the procedures to follow when adding content to ensure their website does not use its organic listings. To combat this issue try to purchase a CMS which makes it easy to create keywords in URLs, title tags, description and alt text. Some CMS systems can also provide feedback as to each page performance for selected keywords. This enables your users to add content whilst checking the SEO of this content.
In conclusion always think about the SEO perspective before purchasing a CMS system. Remember that search engine optimisation is at its easiest when you or a professional SEO company has direct access to the source code.
Paul
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
Everyone is talking about search engine optimisation these days; nevertheless basic SEO concepts are still being overlooked. Here are some of the most common search engine optimisation mistakes:
Many businesses still not considering SEO when developing a website, it’s important to plan your marketing and SEO strategy right from the start. A website that is poorly structured can be very difficult to optimise resulting in an increase of costs.
Using the same title tag in the entire site decreases your chances of ranking well for your target keywords, it is much better to customise each title tag, according to the content in the page.
Removing a popular page from your website resulting in loosing visitors, when re-designing your website try keeping the same site structure in place, if this is not possible use "301 permanently moved", redirecting traffic from all previous pages to the new pages.
Not having a sitemap, Sitemaps can be used to help your visitors finding pages in your site and, most importantly, to search engine spiders find new pages easily. Make sure you update your sitemap every time you add a new page to your website and link to it from your homepage.
Misuse of robots.txt, more often than not webmasters still putting wrong commands in their robotx.txt and accidentally block a search engine.
Improper use of anchor text tag of internal and incoming links, avoid using terms like “Next Page” or “Click Here” when linking to other pages in your site, for effective linking structure use keywords that actually describe the content of the page that you’re linking to. And while you can’t control the anchor text tag in incoming links, you can always ask the linking site to change it or provide ready-made linking codes.
Inaccessible navigation, search engine spiders don’t follow links in certain navigation structures such as flash or JavaScript menus, if they cannot crawl all pages on your site they cannot index it resulting in only a portion of your website being visible.
Linking to (and from) bad sites can actually get your site penalised or even banned. Avoid linking to websites that are associated with obscure activities such as link farms, unethical traffic exchanges or malicious software. And even though you can’t control who links to you, it could potentially damage your reputation if you’re seen hanging out in a bad neighbourhood. If you find any incoming links from such websites you should politely ask them to remove the link.
Optimising for search engine spiders not visitors. Although you need to make sure that your website is spider friendly you should not overlook human visitors’ needs. Optimise your content and design for primarily for users and the search engine success will follow.
Tino
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
