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4 Tips to Making Your Proprietary CMS Search Friendly

July 3, 2008 Comments (4)

Manoj Jasra

Manoj Jasra

Articles

There are often cases where a business will choose to develop a custom content management system (CMS) rather than buying something off the shelf. I have some first hand experience building my own content management system and can testify that if it's implemented corrrectly it will rank as well as any commercial CMS powered website. The key to a developing a good CMS is to first understand the purpose of your website (requirements) and secondly to design the framework (database, business logic, GUI) to support it. There are also some fundamental SEO related guidelines you should build into your proprietary CMS if you hope to rank well in the search engines.

 
  • Unique Meta Tags: Each page on your website should allow for unique meta tags. This will keep your site away from any supplemental index issues and allow you to rank for a broader range of keywords.
  • URL Rewriter: Stay away from dynamic URLs/querystring variables to load content, static URLs are the only way to go. Keywords in the URL are an important ranking factor so make sure to use relevant kewyords in your static URLs. Creating static URLs often requires parsing your URL for keywords so that you can query your database for the correct content.
  • Links: To help search spiders easily crawl throughout the site, add the ability to have unique links within the body content and footer. Implementing a strategy such as bread crumb navigation (with keyword rich anchor text) is both useful for crawlability and search engine rankings.
  • Content/Keyword Insertion: Not only should your content be unique for each page, you should also allow for your CMS to dynamically insert relevant keywords into your content for image alt tags, links, page copy, and meta tags.



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Comments (4)

Solid, well-proven points - thanks. I hadn't heard of number 4 before though. Well, I've known that img alt tags can help with SEO. However, I had never thought about inserting those dynamically. Can you expand on what you mean by that? How do you determine which copy to dynamically use as the alt source?

Thanks!

Posted by: Jon Heller on July 3, 2008

Some good points.
Thanks.

Also some other critical ones:

Make sure the CMS handles missing pages correctly with 404 HTTP headers else you can have all sorts of problems with google indexing existing pages and finding 404 errors and marking it down as 'gone' and finding missing pages as present etc None of which helps your cause or the user experience.

In a similar vein don't forward using 302 redirects - bad news for your ranking with google and chums.

My understanding is that these days keywords in the url isn't really a huge SEO benefit but is certainly better for human users and won't harm . Also google etc al, are a lot better at handling dynamic url query strings these days so if you have a few then don't worry but once again, the advice is good. If you can use url rewriting then do it.

Hope these help

Posted by: Paul Burdon on July 3, 2008

Hi Jon,

What I meant by keyword insertion was based around how your database was setup. For example if you had a Texas real estate site and each of your website's pages were unique to a city (i.e. Houston, Dallas, etc...) then you would want to dynamically insert the names of those cities into the meta tags, page copy, links, etc...

- Manoj

Posted by: Manoj on July 3, 2008

Paul,

Great additional points on 404 error pages and 302 redirects.

I agree that Google is now smarter at indexing dynamic URLs, however I believe that having keywords in the URL are still the optimum way to go (especially if the URLs match the search queries of users).

- Manoj

Posted by: Manoj on July 3, 2008

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About the Author

Manoj Jasra has been in the Internet Marketing industry since 2002, he currently leads Internet Marketing Strategies at Shaw Communications Inc. Prior to Shaw, Manoj was the Director of Technology and Sr. Strategist at Enquiro Search Solutions. Manoj provides business consulting through his company Jasra Inc and authors one of the leading Online Marketing/Analytics blogs: Web Analytics World.


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Search Engine Guide > Manoj Jasra > 4 Tips to Making Your Proprietary CMS Search Friendly

Manoj Jasra has been in the Internet Marketing industry since 2002, he currently leads Internet Marketing Strategies at Shaw Communications Inc. Prior to Shaw, Manoj was the Director of Technology and Sr. Strategist at Enquiro Search Solutions. Manoj provides business consulting through his company Jasra Inc and authors one of the leading Online Marketing/Analytics blogs: Web Analytics World.

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