Web Spider - friend of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A content management system (abbreviated as CMS) is a great way to manage a website, regardless of its size.  Even a very small website can benefit from the power offered by CMS.  One problem that many CMS programs face is in producing content that is friendly to search engines.  One might say that having a good content management system enables you to have a big site, but unless it is easily crawled and optimized for search engines it is not likely to be successful.  Perhaps two of the biggest problems that CMS faces are generating unique keywords for each page and in creating “search engine friendly” urls.

If you do some reading on the internet you’ll find that Joomla is often thought of as being a “SEO friendly” content management sytem.  It might not do everything for SEO right out of the box but there are many extensions that you can easily install which will improve your search engine rankings.  These will help you to overcome most of the shortcomings usually associated with using a powerful CMS.

The current trend in search engine optimization (SEO) appears to be focusing less on small technical details of the page and more on assessing the true value of your site to a visitor.  Rather than hassling with small details like META tags it seems more prudent to create a site that provides excellent value to visitors.  Search engines will reward you with visitors - since their business model depends on their ability to provide meaningful information to their users.

What does this mean to people using a content management system and wanting to optimize their website for search engines?

Well firstly, try to remember that content is king.  If you have a large amount of relevant content on your site you’ll generate authority for your site.  You’ll also start to take advantage of the “long tail” of search.  If you look at the sites that attract many thousands of visitors, enjoy high search engine rankings, and are profitable you’ll notice that they have a lot of useful content (not spam, not repetition, but proper useful content).

Secondly build pages thinking of what your user wants rather than what is “right” for SEO.  The search engines change their algorithms from time to time as they constantly try to weed out the search engine optimization techniques that are a distortion of their central business model.

Thirdly make your site as easy to crawl by search engines as possible.  Sure you’ve got great content, but make sure that it’s easily accessible.  This means that you should create a Google and Yahoo! formatted sitemap.  Some people argue that if you need a sitemap then there is something wrong with your navigation structure.  They’re probably right - but there is no harm in helping search engines find your content.

One metric that I’m always interested in is the bounce rate of my websites.  I don’t like to see visitors coming to my site and then immediately leaving (neither do the search engines incidentally) because it means that somehow my website didn’t serve their interest.  This could mean either that my description in the organic search results was inaccurate or that my advert text in a PPC campaign needs to be adjusted.  The cold realization is that if my visitors don’t like my site then search engines will stop sending them to me.  It is very important (in my opinion) to follow the paths users take through the site to ensure that they can find the information they’re looking for rather than having them just bounce away.

So when building a CMS that is optimized for search engines it is important to ensure that you are able to pay attention to the few “on page” factors that matter as well as the points raised above.  Luckily Joomla has a wide ecosystem of developers who have provided many extensions that will help you to accomplish this goal.

~Andy

Tags: Search Engine Optimization, SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 9:38 am by Bertus Floor and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. 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.