Summarising the news…Netconcepts USA has been acquired by Covario Inc., one of the big players in enterprise class search advertising software and services. The combined company has customers in key industries such as high tech, financial services, ecommerce, retail, consumer electronics, media, life sciences, and consumer packaged goods. We consider this great news for the US business as it strengthens both companies and gives our US team the opportunity to work with new clients in industries they haven’t traditionally served. Good news all round.

So what does it mean for Netconcepts New Zealand?

Netconcepts NZ has had the same shareholders as Netconcepts USA, but it is a separate entity and is not part of the sale. In other words, for us it is business as usual. We’ll continue to serve the New Zealand and Australia markets as we have been for the past 10 years. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

Netconcepts China is similarly not impacted by the sale.

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As far as the advertiser is concerned, there is not much joy when it comes to click costs for the keywords they target in their ppc campaigns. Unlike the stock market where crashes occur, the prices of keywords have been going up steadily and there is no possibility of them coming down in future.  It is not fair to expect every advertiser to know the intricacies of PPC marketing and factors like quality score, targeting and relevancy.

It is true that PPC marketing can bring forth quick results and most importantly it can be measured accurately. When you spend money on advertising, you want to know your exact Return On Investment (ROI). Please be aware that I am not mentioning other smaller paid networks like Chitika, Bidvertiser and 7Search as the traffic volume is lower and I am not sure about their potential to convert visitors into customers.

Unlike traditional forms of advertising like newsprint, television and radio, PPC is admirable in its ability to give a clear picture of whether a campaign is successful or not in a short period of time. You can get your ad listing and hence your site at the top in no time at all.  This is not the case with natural search where search engine optimisation (SEO) is employed to boost the site’s visibility on the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and it is a time consuming effort intense process.

The Cost Per Click (CPC) varies from industry to industry. Even three years ago, it was possible to locate niches within popular industries like real estate and health where the average CPC could be obtained for 30 to 50 cents. Today it is almost impossible to achieve such CPCs. In a major metropolitan city, for example, a popular keyword in the real estate industry can cost anywhere between $8 and $15. A statistical range is quoted here.

As Adwords is a bidding system, if your competitors inflate the bidding costs and you end up in a bidding war, then it is Google that is laughing all the way to the bank. This is where the targeting and relevancy of your PPC campaigns come into play and quality score weighs in to help you keep your ad spend in check to reasonable levels.

Though Google search and content network put together command a huge chunk of the PPC market, it is worth considering a few alternatives which offer a decent amount of traffic and less prohibitive advertising costs. You would be well advised to check out the following alternatives.

What are the alternatives to Google Adwords?

1) Yahoo Search Marketing:
You can run your PPC ads on Google Adwords to start with, say for a month or two and identify the keywords that perform well. You can then open an account with Yahoo and advertise on their paid network. Though there can be a distinct difference in the traffic volume, you can still generate qualified paid traffic at much lower costs.

2) MSN adCenter:
This is the paid search platform run by Microsoft. There are some cool tools you can use to improve your campaign’s quality once you have registered as an advertiser. In recent years, MSN have lifted their game and the adCenter is a good place to attract qualified paid traffic at lower CPC.

3) Facebook:
Facebook is a force to reckon with in terms of the huge following it has in the form of its members. It is in the forefront of social media and is poised to be a major influence in search patterns in years to come with social media affecting buying decisions as consumers turn more and more to their counterparts in their human network of which they are a part.

Facebook has an incredible database of user profiles like personal tastes, hobbies etc and a wide range of other personal information. As an advertiser, you can target your ads demographically to suit your target audience in terms of their age, profession, gender, location etc.

This is also an acid test for you as to how much you know about your business. A primary criterion is your knowledge of your target audience to be successful in your business. In the end, you are going to pay far less per qualified visitor than what you would on other major paid search networks.

4) Stumbleupon:
Stumbleupon has a nice advertising program that is IP geo targeted to display ads that are in sync with the location from where the user is located. SU has a popular browser add on that allows users to stumble (or bookmark) interesting  content on the web. The rules governing stumbling are pretty rigid in that Stumbleupon is very strict on spammers.

Ads displayed cost a few cents per click compared to the other big players. It is worth giving this advertising program a try.

5) Linkedin:
This is an extremely popular network of professional of every kind. Yet it is not leveraged properly by many. You can join the group that is relevant to your industry once you join and there is virtually a group for every possible activity on earth.

If you are selling blue widgets, then you can join a group that is focused on blue widgets, build a relationship with your fellow members and after active engagement in the group’s discussions, you can subtly introduce the fact you sell blue widgets. Though this does not inovle any paid activity, it is a good way to leverage a powerful medium like Linkedin.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing company offering seo and ppc services to its clients in Wellington and Christchurch and also in Australia.

This event not only provides good opportunities for interactive discussion of new techniques and new methods of search marketing, but also aims to create a sustainable interactive platform for internet marketing in the long run in China.

The search marketing salon drew many SEOs’ attention and was well received industry wide. Many reputable companies from internet related industries attended this event including Elong travel booking, Net Ease, adSage, 99go.com, taikang insurance, DHgate.com, China Travel Service Head Office, 99Bill.com, Tuubar.com and Edeng.cn to name a few.

As honored guests, Mr. Zhang Tao (Baidu search marketing manager) and Allen Qu (Netconcepts CEO) held a series of seminars on search marketing techniques and development with many case studies.

The CEO of  Netconcepts China,  Mr. Allen Qu shared his experience in search marketing, including  differences between Baidu SEO and Google Search Engine Optimisation (SEO),  resolving content duplication issues on websites, case studies on search marketing,  updates on “nofollow” issues, blogging techniques and use of popular SEO tools.

Differences In SEO Approach For Baidu and Google:
On the topic of differences between Baidu SEO and Google SEO, Allen said: “SEO for these two major search engines in China does not have any fundamental difference, but the imperative thing we should keep in mind is to fulfill clients’ needs”.

He also elaborated the differences in approach with some typical examples and then he introduced two main methods of resolving duplicate content: Canonical Tag and 301 redirect.   He completed his speech with an analysis of Search Engine Optimisation in general.

Key points by Baidu Search Marketing Mangaer:
Mr. Zhang Tao, the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) manager from Baidu presented an indepth analysis of Keyword research for SEM or PPC (pay per click), which included operation processes, marketing strategies, search behavior and trends.

Under the topic of SEM operation process, Mr. Zhang Tao introduced 7 major steps including goals of SEM, keyword data and analysis of historical data, strategic planning, tracking, reporting, analyzing and optimisation.

Outling a successful SEM strategy, he introduced methods and shared valuable information on how to break through the bottleneck of SEM. He then predicted search behavior and trends with the help of concrete examples.

Active Interaction:
The event witnessed active interaction between the speakers and the attending SEOs on the popular search marketing issues and topics confronting the industry today. The personal experiences of SEO practitioners in tackling various issues both unique to the China SEO industry and in general provided invaluable wisdom to all present.

The Beijing  search marketing salon highlighted the importance and value of new media marketing in the current economic trends. Search marketing is able to bring businesses more measureable and effective outcomes compared with traditional marketing. It also fulfills the needs of quick and effective Return on Investment (ROI) for businesses.

The event provided good opportunity for knowledge sharing and innovation. The attendees got a great insight into  internet marketing.

Netconcepts China is an integrated e-marketing company offering the best of  search engine optimization, search engine marketing, personalized internet marketing services and website development.

Netconcepts,  founded in 1995 by Stephan Spencer in the United States, is one of the leading internet marketing companies. As a member of the international search engine marketing experts association, Netconcepts has been providing search engine marketing solutions to the global Top 500 companies and numerous large-scale Web sites by its professional SEO consulting team in the past 14 years and achieved great success.

Netconcepts New Zealand is a well established New Zealand search marketing company offering search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

The client list of Netconcepts Group includes Expedia,  Elong travel booking site, Taikang insurance, Epson (China), Microsoft, Yahoo!, America Online, HP, Discovery Discovery Channel, Verizon, Disney, Zappos, Air New Zealand, House of Travel, CNET.com, MP3.com, the University of Auckland New Zealand, and so forth.

A collection of photos of the Search Marketing Salon 2009 Event in Beijing, China

The next step would be to determine the reputation of the indexed pages and finally rank and return the most relevant pages in response to users’ search queries. Google spends a lot on resources (hardware) in carrying out crawling and indexing operations. It is quite expensive and this explains the reason why there are only 3 major search engines capapble of doing this and providing these results to secondary sites for a fee.

According to Google, a large team of developers in Googleplex have been working for several months rewriting the code to evolve the current search infrastructure into a new high tech next generation search machine that pushes the limits on dimensions like size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness to name a few.

This under the hood technology will not appear different to most users in terms of the search experience or the results outputted. But power users and developers can notice changes. To get their valuable feedback on Caffeine, Google has opened a web developers preview to collect valuable feedback at  http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

According to the post by Vanessa Fox on the new Caffeine search index, Matt Cutts mentioned that the major difference would be the way in which Google indexes the web. This could be achieved by super efficient code driving crawling efforts vigorously both breadth and depth wide and indexing quality pages beyond the purview of the PageRank spectrum.

My pet peeve would be that currently, well established industry sites enjoy so much domain authority and trust that even for new developments in their respective industries, they dominate the top pages of the SERPs even though they do not necessarily take the effort to update their content on a regular basis. This does not refer to news sites which are hugely popular both in the online search space including social media.

The downside is that newer sites that work hard to deliver quality content to their users still do not get much benefit as they rank temporarily for a few hours or days for hot industry related developments (based on the QDF or Query Deserves Freshness algorithm) and then subside to lower rankings after a few days. This excessive importance to the domain authority and trust enjoyed by established sites can sometimes come in the way of providing relevant fresh search results.

The Google Webmasterscentral blog gives a good account of  Caffeine, Google’s new search infrastructure setup and so does Matt Cutt’s blog.

Netconcepts is a leading Auckland seo service provider offering organic seo and ppc services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

In my opinion, submission to article directories is still a force to reckon with if done right from the SEO perspective. Quality content is still vital for a site to reflect its dominance and authority in a particular field both in the eyes of users and Google. Article directories play an important role in propagating useful information posted by authors on various subjects.

It is true that article directories get spammed with poor quality articles. Sometimes owners of article directories monetize their site for Adsense to make a difference to their bottom line in the quest for the extra $.

This invariably compromises with the quality of content on the directory. Google does not give much importance to such spammy directories and devalues them. Having links from such directories is not going to help a site rank well for its targeted keyword phrase.

1) Restrict submission to strong article directories:
A few top quality article directories that come to mind are ezinearticles.com, buzzle.com, zimbio.com, articledashboard.com, selfgrowth.com and goarticles.com These are well established and have a good domain integrity. A site owner can post regularly to these directories and ensure that she can get a small slice of the domain trust and authority these sites enjoy back to her site through that resource link in her article.

2) Good quality content:
An article that is submitted to a directory should provide value to the reader. This is not the case with many articles. It is marked by self promotion and hype and how the product or service offered is the best and so on and so forth.

If good factual information is presented and right at the end of the article, there is a subtle call to action ( a good example would be to write 50% of engaging content in the article and a link to the rest of the content can be directed to a page on the actual site), it gives the readers a great opportunity to appreciate it and the number of pageviews of the rest of the article will be ample proof of its popularity.

3) One way link in the resource section:
The author must have a link to her site in the author’s resource section. An appropriate use of anchor text with the right choice of the targeted keyword phrase provides a valuable one way link back to the author’s site. At the start of the article, the author’s name is also hyperlinked to the author’s profile where a link can be given to the owner’s site.

It is wise to desist from peppering the article with links as it diverts the user’s attention. Moreover, editorial guidelines can be flaunted and the article disallowed till the excessive number of links in the text are removed.

4) Duplicate Content Filter:
Gone are the days when an author creates an article and copies it and pastes the exact article in 10 different article directories. If done today, it is sure to invite the content dupliaction filter from all the major search engines. Google is particularly harsh in this regard. Its algorithms are also sophisticated to pick out any shades of content duplication and/or plagiarism.

If an article is submitted to say 6 different article directories, it is important that each version retains its own shade of uniqueness. If you have access to PLR articles, then merely introducing a distinct introduction and conclusion is not going to make it unique content. There should be synonyms of targeted keywords in the copy and rephrasing of the article in its entirety.

5) Is Automation the Solution?
In the above scenario, automation can be a solution. There is software which needs the human input to craft an article in its original form. Then variations of the article can be created using such software which checks for the levels of duplication in each version.  Such software can be a good signpost to help contain duplication but not an ultimate solution in themselves.

There is also sfotware in the market for submitting articles to various article directories. If you are serious about mass marketing, this is a way to go. User accounts are created and at the click of a button, the article and its variations can be submitted to various directories. But this can also be counter productive.

WARNING:
If you build links rapidly to the tune of say hundreds of  links pointing to your site overnight, you are doing so at your own peril. No human can build so many links in one day. This is a surefire way to get banned from the search engines.

6) Prediction for the future:
Just as verticals are getting popular Urbanspoon and Yelp), the day is not far off when verticals are going to pop up in article directories. At this point of time, most article directories have separate categories for various fields and articles relevant to each field are included therein. In future, one can expect to see article directories solely dedicated to cooking, gardening, dog training etc.

Depending on your situation, you can decide what suits your site best when it comes to article marketing. It is still a valuable way of gaining one way inbound links. Again, all links are not created equal. The quality of the links matter more than sheer quantity. Article marketing can be used effectively as part of the overall SEO efforts to help rank a site high on the SERPs.

Netconcepts is an Auckland search engine optimisation company that employs the best practice seo techniques to help their clients in New Zealand and Australia gain top rankings on the search engines.

Bing will be the new search engine on Yahoo. Microsoft can integrate Yahoo search technologies into its existing search platforms. Both companies will have their own display advertising business. Microsoft’s AdCenter platform will set the pricing for self serve advertising for both companies.

Although there is a lot of money involved in this deal,  users would be more interested in how things evolve with the retention or crucifixion of web applications and services that they have been using for some time. Applications like Yahoo Search Monkey and Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) by using Delicious bookmarks have been hallmarks in enhancing the semantic nature of the web.

Legal hurdles not withstanding, it will be interesting to watch how the search landscape evolves in future with this new development. Bing’s search market share is expected to increase to 28% after the deal with Yahoo as per Adage reports citing ComScore’s data. The quality of search results from Bing is really good and this is proved by the display of search results on Yahoo powered by Bing in future. Microsoft is the clear winner at this stage.

A search on Bing today shows paid advertisements relevant to the search query on the side and bottom of the organic results. In the proposed scheme, Yahoo will sell paid ads against organic search results powered by Bing.

Yahoo is no stranger to the evolution of search having been around for a long time. Microsoft gains the use of  Yahoo’s search technology to give Bing a powerful springboard to take the fight right into the Google heartland.

Google has always been a frontrunner in developmnt of new and exciting search innovations and has not rested on its laurels. This deal between Yahoo and Bing should now give Google a sense of urgency to evolve further and differentiate to stay ahead of their competitors to dominate the search industry.

Competition is really good especially for the end users in terms of better quality search results and better user experience. It is also easier for search practitioners to switch their mindsets to getting used to two major search engines instead of three.

Yahoo’s search team takes a lot of credit for the development of the semantic web and open standards and lot of time and money have been put into these efforts at the peril of Yahoo getting rounded up for not being commercially savvy company.

A few of the search services that come up for consideration under the new arrangement can be expected to be sacrificial lambs, maybe measured by their ability to generate revenue. Also at stake are the careers of search engineers working on those applications.

According to ReadWriteWeb Yahoo has confirmed that Yahoo Maps search and Yahoo News search services come under the purview of consumer facing list of search services and are no longer formally part of the search department. Since Bing sells such services on its own, Yahoo may end up selling ads against the Bing powered results on Yahoo.com

All these pointers virtually herald the demise of Yahoo as a search giant. Yahoo’s Siteexplorer could face the axe. It has been a great tool to find backlinks to a site. Many applications built around its functionality can bite the dust.

Some of the interesting links related to Bing are:
Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Local and Bing Local Listing Center

Bing Vs Google Results

The new realtionship forged by Yahoo and Microsoft will hopefully add lot more value and quality to their combined search offerings and pose a serious competition to Google in future. A detailed coverage of events can be found at Readwriteweb and SEOmoz.

Netconcepts is an Auckland seo company offering quality search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

There is not much logic in a scenario described above where two totally unrelated irrelevant spheres of activity are exchanging links. Most times, site owners are tantalised by the page rank of a site and make it the be all end all unit of measurement that would deliver them the magical rankings at the top of the SERPs of the major search engines. Sadly, this is not the case. The link factor is just one of the signals out of the several hundreds that search engines use to rank websites.

1) Obtain links naturally:
As a site owner, you have to be really careful when adopting strategies to build links, reciprocal in this case. If the search engines perceive your exchange of links as manipulative by nature, your site is going to be penalised. The key here is to exchange links with sites that are of topical relevance to your site.

The site you are linking to could be a leader in your industry with a trusted and well established domain. You can link to the latest developments in your industry highlighted on that site’s blog. The articles you write on your own site will provide value to your readers and by linking to authoritative sources, you are enhancing your stature in the eyes of your readers as a thought leader in your vertical.

If you are enterprising enough, you can request the other site’s owner to give you a chance as a guest blogger. At the end of your post, you can talk briefly about yourself and get a link back to your site with the appropriate anchor text. This reciprocal linking is an extremely natural association and is viewed with great respect by Google. It takes some effort on your part to gain a link if you are not already a well established site in your vertical.

With such an established symbiotic relationship, reciprocal links in future between your sites will not be viewed suspiciously by the search engines. Your readers will appreciate the dissemination of  valuable information and the relevance of your topically aligned sites.

2) The Role of Anchor Text:
Most times, when you gain a backlink to your site, you have no way of controlling the anchor text. It is upto the person linking to your site that coins the link text.  You cannot stop spammy sites from linking to you either. But your site linking to bad neighbourhood will be a big negative for the search engines.

Imagine you have a page of great quality content on evolution of rock n roll.  If the site linking to that page has a mention of rock n roll in its anchor text, Google can clearly see that it is a vote of confidence from an external unbiased source providing confirmation that your page is indeed about rock n roll.

These votes from external sites play a major role in conveying the intent of content on your site. As a site owner, you have total control over your site and your internal linking architecture can be adjusted the way you want it to be. It is the external referencing that adds weight to your own internal link anchor text. The more votes you have coming into a page on your site, the brighter the chances of ranking high for that specific keyword (or anchor text).

If you want specific anchor text for your link on your compatriot’s site, it is only natural to give back a link with the anchor text requested by the owner of the other site. This is in cases where you find the anchor text applied misleading or not so relevant. What you get is what you give.

Using the same anchor text for every site that you link to is another no-no. If you have the luxury of asking the other site owners to vary the anchor text of links pointing to your site, that is another win in your quest for top rankings.

3) Reciprocal Links from One Links Page to Another:
If you have a page of links on your site and you exchange links with another site owner on a page of links on her site, topical relevance not withstanding, the links are not considered valuable. All links are not created equal. The strength of a  link depends on the domain on which it resides, the context in which the linking takes place and the intent behind the linking.

Though site owners in the past have successfully increased their backlinks by exchanging links with thousands of sites, today, it is a hard ask to gain top rankings using such methods. Use of link farms, three way linking, excessive reciprocal linking are a sure recipe to disastrous results.

If your site has a page of links or resources, linking to appropriate government agencies in your region, local city councils, relevant important industry information sites etc, you will not be a candidate for penalty from the search engines.

4) Build relationships and links will follow:
If you use social media properties like Facebook and Twitter, build a good personal rapport with your friends and followers first. Take time to know them as much as you can. The important point here is to have similar likes and tastes. Once everything is in place, it is only a matter of time when you post a blog on your site and tweet about it. Depending on the interest generated, you could have a horde of incoming links to your post.

In summary, reciprocal linking is still effective and relevant today if it is done in a natural manner and does not indicate spam to the search engines. It is more the quality of the links than sheer quantity that matters a lot to aid your site in topping the SERPs.

Netconcepts is an Auckland search engine optimisation company enjoying a good reputation and standing in the SEO industry in Australia and New Zealand.

Most web site owners find it a daunting task to build links. I have come across cases where businesses have outsourced their link building campaigns to unknown or shady practitioners purporting to be experts. They end up linking to spam sites and the site owner’s site gets crucified being kicked out of the Google Index.

Falling prey to link building schemes is easy so beware. As a serious business owner, you would be well off building your site’s external linking profile yourself or leave it to a reputed well known SEO firm to handle it for you.

The various ways of building links:

1) Kickass Content:
I cannot stress enough on quality content. Original unique content is the key to earning links. With top quality content on your  blog or articles on your site, you attract the eye of other site owners in the same vertical as yours and they recognise the merit in your content by linking to it. This is the best way of earning links. Such links are meritorious and endure the test of time by being relevant to the industry in which your business operates.

Looking at it from a practical view point, Google is really asking you how much of an expert you are in your industry. The links pointing to your site from other topical sites are a very strong signal to Google and links with appropriate anchor text gives Google the confirmation that your site is really what you describe it as. These links are votes from external unbiased sources that affirm what your site or page is about.

If you cannot write, you can jot down the points for your proposed blog post or article and pass it on to a good copywriter to put into a nice readable form.

2) Article Submission:
This is a method that has been flogged over the years and many feel it has lost its charm. It is a great way of gaining inbound links from good article directories like ezinearticles.com, zimbio.com and buzzle.com to name a few. When you create an article and post it on your site or blog, make sure that you are creating variations of the original.

If you are targeting half a dozen article directories, you can post variations of the original article to these sites and gain great inbound links. Duplicating the content all over the place is not going to help your site’s cause.

The various domains on which your article gets published, the more your domain diversity is varied. Domain diversity is another factor that I have written about that plays an important role in search engine rankings.  All these add up to the site getting more traction to help it rank better on the SERPs as well.

3) Using Social Media:
If you have a blog to which you post atleast 3 times a week, you can convert it into an RSS feed and export them to Web 2.0 properties that you own. To start with, you can post your content feeds on Squidoo, Tumblr, Twitter to name a few and the blog search leaderTechnorati.

These are sites residing on powerful domains and links from such domains to your site will be very beneficial. Another crucial factor is the number of visitors. These are popular social spots where traffic mills around all the time. Your interesting posts will receive lot of eyeballs.

Again, the important point is to keep your social media properties active and update them regularly. A good way is to post your RSS feed from yor blog on these sites.

Please avoid hyping about your products and services and promoting yourself to the max. It is a turn off. Remain as objective as possible. You are on a winning path.

4) Submitting to Directories:
This is a dead process for most search marketing experts. I would still give this some value. The good folks at SEOmoz have posted a good list of powerful directories. A lot of them require a payment for your site to be considered for inclusion. You have to read the terms and conditions of each directory before submitting your site.

Some of the directories like Yahoo charge US$299 per year for listing your site. There is no guarantee that your site will be accepted in which case you lose your money. All submitted sites are reviewed by humans. Your site should be of an acceptable standard. Google gives lot of merit to such a strict vetting process. If your site is of a good standard and you get accepted, the link back to your site from such powerful domains are invaluable and well worth it.

5) Reciprocal Link Building:
This is another method that has lost its sheen because of excessive abuse in the past. You can gain value from this if this is done right. If you approach a peer site in your industry with a request for a reciprocal link, make sure you have linked to her site first and point this out in your email.

Please do not have a separate page called Links on your site under which you list your link partners. Such pages are not given much weight at all. You would be well of giving links contextually to a leading website in your industry naturally placing it in your content in a post or article. This is much more valuable to the other site. The other site owner will also be inclined to position your link on a more attractive place on her site than banish it to an unknown part of her site.

From the afore mentioned techniques, you will find one common strain running through them all - it requires hard work and patience on your part. Using the flashiest link building software that gives you a thousand links in one month is only going to destroy your site’s reputation in the eyes of Google.

Also, do not be afraid to link to authoritative websites in your industry as this enhances your good neighbourhood profile of your site. Finally, link to sites that are topically relevant to your site. You cannot always control who links to you. But you have the power to link to the right sources that are both topical and relevant to your focus.

If you find this daunting or you lack the time to do it, then you can leave it to Netconcepts, an Auckland link building services provider. We are a professional Auckland SEO  company and do link building for our clients to help them improve their backlink profile and help improve the clients’ site visibility on the search engines.

There is no doubt that CMS makes life easy for a site owner to update content on her site. The tragedy herein is that hardly any thought is put in to the search engine optimisation aspects of the proposed website. This is a strong comment being made because there are a number of CMS driven sites that still have problems getting indexed and ranked in the search engines. There is no disrespect attributed to either the designers or the creators of the open source CMS platofrms.

As a small business owner, if you have a decent idea about the basic search engine friendly features of a CMS, it should go a long way in helping you deliberate on the following points with your designer/developer before proceeding to build your website.

1) Page Title:
When you select a CMS, ensure that you can navigate to the granular level of an individual page and change its title. The common problem is that lot of sites tend to have the same page title for all the pages on their site. Many a time, the CMS being used has a global site wide title tag. The title of the page is one of the heavily weighted factors in on page optimisation.

2) Meta Desccription:
This is the chunk of information that appears below your site title on the Google search engine ranking pages (SERPs). A good description of the page gives both humans and googlebot a great idea of what the page is about.

A good title and description would make the listing on the SERPs inviting enough to be clicked upon by users and visit the site. In many cases, the meta description is the same for all pages on a site or completely absent. You have to ensure that the CMS lets you create a unique meta description for each page.

3) URL Structure:
One of the biggest problems confronting CMS solutions is the structure of the URL. Some of the solutions mangle them so badly that they look odd and are very unfriendly to remember. Linking to them also becomes hard.  The domain name is followed by query string parameters that are lengthy and consists of alphanumeric characters.

The mod rewrite function on Apache servers can be used to convert them into search engine friendly (SEF) URLs. Jennita Lopez at SEOmoz has a  great post on using the mod rewrite function.

There are CMS solutions that can convert unfriendly URLs into SEF URLs. You would be well advised to do a thorough research on this important factor before deciding on your CMS of choice.

4) Content Duplication:
This is another major problem confronting sites built out of a CMS solution. The proper way is for each page of content on your site to be accessed by a single URL. If there are two or more distinct URLs leading to the same page of content, it results in content duplication.

In the same vein, another problem is the resolution of the home page. For example consider the domain www.mysite.com If the default page on the site is index.htm, the domain’s home page would be www.mysite.com/index.htm

The CMS then converts all the internal links pointing to the home page to the /index.html version. The real drama starts when external links to this site point to the root domain www.mysite.com The Pagerank juice from the home page gets split badly between the default page version of the home page and the root domain version. The best way to fix it is insist to your designer or developer to implement the home page version properly at the time of building the site.

Trying to create 301 redirects in this situation after the site has been built will not work. Most web server software will not allow the default page from being redirected to the root domain version bt itself.

Also, many CMS software use a 302 temporary redirect from the root domain to the default page version. This blocks any link juice being flowed in the process.

Another duplication problem to watch out for is the www version and non www version of the site. In many cases, the URLs http://www.mysite.com and http:// mysite.com  both lead to the same content resulting in content duplication. You can sort this out by doing a 301 redirect from one version to the one of your choice.

Else, you can log into your site’s Webmasters interface. Under the Settings tab, under Preferred domain, you can check the radio button that says - Display URLs as www.mysite.com The changes will be reflected over time.

5) Information Architecture:
Some of the CMS solutions are quite unwieldy in allowing the organisation of information on the site in a friendly manner. The system is made up of categories, sections and sub-sections that the money pages are more than 3 clicks away from the home page. More resources have to expended by the search engine bots to spider the site of many levels effectively.

To link to a page that has been created, a menu item has to be created under the Menu Manager. Mastering the use of a CMS involves a steep learning curve as well.  A small business owner ends up investing a lot of time and money in getting a site built using CMS and mastering how to use it.

There are some very good open source CMS solutions that can do a good job. If you intend to conduct some serious business online, preferably an ecommerce site, you will be well off buying a paid commercial solution. You get better support and fixes in the long run. With a free solution, you must be prepared to spend a lot of time on forums to learn more about troubleshooting problems caused by a particular CMS solution.

If the afore mentioned problems can be borne in mind and the site built to make life easy for the bots to crawl through and to retain humans on the site, it is a win win situation for getting the site pages indexed and subsequently ranked for user search queries on major search engines and good conversion on the site.

Netconcepts is a well established Auckland SEO firm that employs cutting edge up to date search engine optimisation techniques to give their clients good value for their money in terms of rankings and well optimised websites that endure the test of time on the SERPs.