You are here: Home / News / Resources / Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization and Content Management Software

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be a key factor in choosing a Content Management Software (CMS) for your website. Recent advancements have enabled savvy CMS, like elements CMS, to help make websites more search engine friendly. Good CMS will allow you to easily create keyword-rich webpages, including use of meta tags in the code, which make those pages search engine friendly. This in turn helps interested viewers find your website and supports your overall Internet marketing efforts.

By ensuring that your CMS is SEO friendly, you can make huge strides toward ensuring your website is well-positioned in search engines.

Search Engine Friendly URLs
If you are currently using Content Management Software, it is important to determine if it creates page URLs that are search engine friendly. A search engine friendly URL is one where the web page address produced by the CMS can easily be found and indexed, or “spidered”, by search engines. For example, a search engine friendly URL would be http://www.yourwebsite.com/about_us/history.html, where the URL contains all keywords. Alternatively, a non search engine friendly URL would be something like http://www.yourwebsite.com/default.asp?ID=123. Special characters like ‘?’ are hard for search engines to index because they don’t recognize such characters, and a URL with no keywords contains nothing that helps in search engine rankings.

Keep content current
One of the fundamental advantages of CMS is how it makes it easy for non-technical users to add and edit web content. This ease of use also plays in importantly to favorable search engine ranking. When indexing a site, search engines check for file timestamps. Search engines look for the most pertinent and current content and give credence to sites more recently updated. If the content of a site is updated on a regular basis, search engines will frequently revisit that site.

CMS-generated site map shows your entire site
Good CMS automatically generate a site map, or a list of every page of the website. If your CMS also generates search engine friendly URLs, these two factors also help with search engine rankings. When search engines index a website, it searches each and every page. The site map is important in that a comprehensive list of links on a site will be provided directly to the search engine.

ALT tags, title tags and metadata
Good CMS should make it easy for one to input such things as ALT tags, title tags and metadata for search engine purposes. The most important metadata item is the title field. The value of the title metadata field is given significant weight by the search engines in determining a page's ranking. In addition, the title appears in the top bar of the web browser as the default value when someone bookmarks a page or adds it to their favorites, and is the value in bold on the results page from the search engine. The title is given tremendous importance by the search engines and should be carefully crafted for each page on a site.

After the title field, two other commonly used tags are "description" and "keywords." These two metadata fields provide the ability to place a description of the webpage, as well as any keywords that are relevant to that webpage. Though there is speculation that Google does not use these fields any longer, other search engines do and other types of searches still use this metadata.

Overall, making sure your CMS is ‘search engine friendly’ is one of the most important things you can do. Asking the questions above will provide a thorough investigation of any CMS you are considering.

elements CMS Tips & Tricks

There are many useful and cool tricks within elements CMS. Here are a few:

Advanced Navigation
When in Navigation>Advanced Pull-Down Navigation check out all the things you can do to style your navigation scheme. Particularly cool are the Sub-Nav Animation pull down, which lets you animate your drop down menus, and all the features under Effects, such as menu transparency, drop shadow and 3-D effects.

Page layouts
elements 2 offers complete control over page layouts, so you can fully customize content page layouts, search results page layouts and complete control over your shopping cart pages.

Templates
At the heart of good website design with ease-of-update in mind are templates. elements CMS allows you to create templates which then 'wrap around' your content pages. The beauty of this system is that anytime you update a template it automatically updates any page associated with it.

Case Study: Santa Barbara's Elings Park

Elings Park is the largest and most diverse, nonprofit 501(c)(3) park in Santa Barbara and the Tri-Counties area, offering a wide range of youth, adult and senior activities, cultural/family events and the largest veteran’s memorial site in Santa Barbara County. The park attracts over 200,000 visitors a year. With major financial contributions from the community, organizations and corporate sponsors, Elings Park is looking ahead with a $15M expansion and renovation.

The staff at Elings Park needed a comprehensive and capable website to accommodate their visitors and facilitate future growth of the park. They awarded New Image Technologies the contract to completely redesign and re-architect their existing website and integrate it with elements CMS to facilitate website content management, e-commerce and online reservations functionality.

[top]