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First Do No Harm: Search Engine Optimization and Web Content Management

Many CMS vendors market Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features. A couple firms have actually made SEO the cornerstone of their marketing. I think that this is misleading. While a good Web CMS can go a long way in enforcing SEO best practices, a CMS cannot elevate search results by itself. In supporting SEO CMS vendors should take the same approach as a good doctor..."First do no harm."

The fact is that a CMS can lower your search rankings but can do little advance them. A CMS can lower rankings by using programmatic URLS, script and code heavy templates, complex information architecture and site structure, restricting or neglecting meta data, and not supporting modern Web standards.

Conversely, an SEO-friendly CMS helps makes content descriptive by supporting proper URL structure and meta data, makes content easy to crawl by using valid XHTML and CSS, and provide consistent use of site navigation and information architecture to better organize content.

While these features help, your SEO rankings are primarily driven from the authority and relevancy of your content, not from your CMS. Authority is derived from off-page items like the age of the domain, the TLD (.edu, .gov), the number of sites hosted on your IP and most importantly the number of sites linking to your website and those sites authority. Relevancy has to do with website content and its meta data as well as the anchor text and relevancy of the content of the pages linking to your website.

Obviously a CMS is not going to generate more links to your website, or make your domain older, or more trustworthy. So a CMS will do little to elevate your rankings. But it can be really helpful in making your content easier to index and to organize in a meaningful information architecture.

To evaluate the SEO benefits of a CMS I would recommend looking at how the CMS supports:

• Search Engine Friendly URLs. SEO-friendly URLs use descriptive keywords separated by a hyphen or an underscore; e.g. http://www.domain.com/this-is-the-keyword.html. A spider will not read anything past a question mark or other special character. So a dynamic URL like /pageID?keyword.aspx will not provide any SEO benefit.
• Standardized styles for your content. HTML styles like an h1 header or strong tag add weight to your content. If optimizing for a keyword you should repeat the keyword in the URL, meta data, h1 and other tags. Make sure that the CMS supports formatting content in this regard.
• Enforced use of meta data. The most important meta data on a web page is the page title. Other types of meta data include the meta description, table captions, image alt-text, link titles, etc. Some people use Meta Keywords as well, but these will not impact your rankings. While Meta Keywords are ignored by Google, they are still used as synonyms by Yahoo! It is a judgment call whether to use them for your website. If a CMS vendor touts their great feature for recommending keywords (I have actually heard this pitch) they are selling spin not value.
• Valid XHTML and CSS. Happy code is accessible code. Search engines love XHTML and CSS. It is easy to crawl and very descriptive. You do not want any proprietary tagging or scripting in your templates. There is a whole other post waiting to be written on the crossover between accessibility (WAI, 508, etc) and SEO. The bottom line is that they are one and the same.
• Automatic navigation. Search engines love descriptive links and navigation. A link will attribute the authority for a certain keyword to a page. A good CMS will manage all of the site-wide navigation automatically. This includes your top navigation, sectional navigation, breadcrumb or ancestor navigation, footer navigation, etc. I would argue that navigation is the primary value for CMS not only for lowering the costs of website operation but also for supporting good SEO practices.
• Flexible Information Architecture (IA). Your information architecture is how your website is organized in sections and sub-pages. The higher a page is in the information architecture the more value it has in the rankings. Ideally you want a flat, topically organized IA. A good CMS will let you drag-and-drop your content in a managed hierarchy or "site tree," making it easy to elevate pages and content. A really good CMS will also let you manage your content by topics using a taxonomy system.

Once you have selected a CMS for its SEO merits you are not out of the woods. An SEO-friendly CMS still has pitfalls. One of the most common issues is duplicate content, which is a byproduct of the content reuse focus of many CMS solutions, including Ingeniux CMS.

Duplicate content negatively impacts your rankings by causing canonical issues. Canonical is a fancy word for how search engines determine the authoritative or original version content. You can avoid these issues by using no-index tags on your printer friendly links, mobile pages, RSS feeds, and PDF content if it mirrors live web content. Ingeniux offers SEO audits to our customers to check their websites for a wide range of SEO issues including duplicate content.

Other recommendations for elevating your rankings with a CMS include redirecting your old URLs (So many organizations neglect to do this that I will need to write a post on mod-rewriting with Ingeniux CMS); redirecting all of the variations in your URL (www, /, index.html, etc); building menus with CSS rather than JavaScript (read our best practices in XHTML document), internal linking to create authoritative pages, and of course optimizing your key content.

While a Web CMS can play a key role in managing a search optimized website there is only one way to get consistently high search rankings: create "link worthy" and original content. If people start linking to your website your rankings will skyrocket. When it comes to choosing a CMS be smart about choosing a CMS with good SEO support, but look beyond the hype and choose a solution that supports best practices while also being easy for your team to use. At the end of the day people not software manage the web.

Posted by David Hillis