Does Your CMS Leverage Best SEO Practice to Get You Found?
Posted in Content Management,SEO/SEM by Bridgeline Digital on October 5th, 2009
Previously, I wrote about how to maximize your website’s SEO with your CMS. This post covered what you can control from a content manager perspective. But what about some other factors you can’t control? Content Management Systems are great vehicles for non-technical users to update their website, but often don’t take care of some more technical SEO areas.
A great CMS will automatically supercharge your website’s SEO.
We’re always launching updates to our own CMS, and we’re particularly excited about a recent update which addresses automatic 301-redirects and sitemap.xml file creation.
Auto 301-redirects
301 redirects are extremely important to SEO. But what exactly is a 301-redirect?
A 301 redirect is the correct way to redirect a page from one URL to another. Search engines will transfer all SEO credit to the redirected page.
Let’s say your website has a page that ranks on page 1 of Google for the phrase Cape Cod Resort. Maybe this page is located at http://www.acme-co.com/cape-cod-resort4.html. This page consistently brings you hundreds of leads each summer. But your webmaster is hard to reach, and you contact a local web vendor for a design and CMS installation so you can edit your own website. They transfer all your content to the CMS installation and your /cape-cod-resort4.html page now lives at a URL of http://www.acme-co.com/cape-cod-resort.This is a memorable, clean URL.
But Google has awarded so much SEO credit to http://www.acme-co.com/cape-cod-resort4.html and now they think the page no longer exists since there is no 301 re-direct! Your great SEO has gone down the drain! A 301-redirect would have transferred all visitors and SEO value to the new page. If you need to change a URL on your website and your CMS does not automatically 301-redirect to the new page, make sure to contact your web department and inform them of this step! If not, you could lose SEO credit you’ve built up!
Sitemap.xml auto-generation
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and MSN all use a standardized method for allowing site administrators to notify them of new pages to “crawl”. This an XML file usually referred to as a sitemap.xml file. While search engines can index your website without this file, it’s recommend practice as it allows search engines to do so in a more intelligent manner. Advanced users can supply additional information in their sitemap file like priority and modification dates. Check with your CMS vendor to make sure this is part of their product. Any new pages created on your website will automatically be submitted to search engines for spidering.
Written by Marcel Moreau
Marcel,
Nice post. Is it possible to do this for a completely different domain?
For example: I currently have mycompany’sname.com and want to switch to a url that fit’s my business description. My thinking is that this would rank better in the search results.
Would the built up seo on the old url transfer over to the new one?
Clayton, this is definitely a big change. If you can live with mycompanysname.com, I would stick with it. Google takes many factors into account when returning results, one of which is domain age. Yes, a domain with rich keywords, is better from the get-go, but changing over to a new domain name from an old domain with some age can be tricky.
The goal would be to map all pages and content from the old domain to new domain. http://mycompanysname.com/about-us.php should 301 re-direct to http://ournewkeyworddomain.com/about-us.php and contain the same content it did on the previous page. In theory, if you do this for every page on your site, you should be ok – and many people have had success in transferring all their page ranking over to a new domain. But Google makes no guarantees and doesn’t explicitly explain how their algorithms work. If you have a website management team, make sure they fully understand the process and the ramifications to your search rankings. If they do not understand or value this process, you should definitely seek outside help from an experienced web dev agency.