How To Select Good CMS In SEO Context For Small Business Website

Hi everyone,
Most small business owners invest time and money in their small business website when they decide to join the internet bandwagon. More often than not, their first point of call is a designer who helps them set up a CMS (Content Management System) so that the owner can add, edit and delete content on the site. Most times, this is an open source CMS. The site can be a plain vanilla type website or an ecommerce site.

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Consultants, Content Management System (CMS), Natural Search, Ravi Venkatesan, SEO-Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.