How to Use a Content Management System for Search Engine Positioning
A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to add, edit or delete content to your website without having to create and format the pages manually. All the pages get generated on the fly, the CMS application picks the template, adds the headers and footers, generates the menus and blocks for your page and then automatically renders the page. As an example, when I wanted to add Google ads to all the pages of my CMS site, I created a block with the Google Adsense code. When I activated it, it automatically appeared on all my pages. If I had to do this page by page, it would have been a nightmare (since my site contains thousands of pages)!
The main reason people hesitate to use CMS is because they think a CMS site will not perform well with search engines. But when used properly, CMS can actually help with scoring points with the search engines. This article shows you how.
We all know that content is king and that the primary function of today’s Internet is to deliver content to those that are seeking it. Most people who do Search Engine Optimization know that the secret to high ranking on the search engines is to get links from external sites, but that’s only half the story. The other face of the SEO coin is to have many internal content pages that point to your main page, thereby increasing the link popularity of that page. CMS allows you to easily manage multiple pages on your site, with the option of groups and categories.
If you run a community site, CMS allows visitors to add content which is then approved by a moderator. Such a system can lead to exponential growth of your website and can be very effective if your content is regularly maintained.
While it is a fact that most free CMS’s available were not designed with the search engine spider in mind, CMS applications are flexible and can be tweaked to help you gain a top rankings with search engines.
How Do You Customize A CMS Application To Improve Search Engine Rankings?
First, there is the issue of dynamic URLs. Most CMS’s will generate URLs with parameters embedded into them. As an example, each article on your site may look like this:
http://yoursite.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=35&SESSIONID=200dbf5df81843102bc2ba2560207841
Not only does it look ugly, the search engines probably won’t spider it. Google has partial support for dynamic URLs but it’s not likely to index your internal pages unless you have a good presence on your main page to begin with. It’s is best to rewrite that URL, to change it into something like this:
http://yoursite.com/article35.html
This can be achieved by making use of the web server module called mod-rewrite
To use this, you’ll need to add a rule to your .htaccess file using regular
expressions to convert the URL. The following 2 lines added to your .htaccess file (in your document root) will achieve the URL conversion for the example above.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^article([1-9][0-9]*).* modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=$1
You need to add one RewriteRule line for each transformation and for different types of URLs. For more details on mod-rewrite, have a look at http://www.sitepoint.com/print/910 This casting using Mod-Rewrite will convert an elegant URL into an ugly one which CMS expects, but how do you convert from the ugly URL to the elegant one?
Most CMS’s come with header and footer includes which you can append with a custom header and footer to apply to all your pages. Assuming that you use PHP and that the HTML is the variable $HTML, you can use PHP code in the header or footer (wherever we have the entire HTML available before sending to the browser client) to convert the ugly URLs to elegant ones.
$in = array(
"'(?<!/)modules.php\?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=([0-9]*)'"
);
$out = array("article\\1.html");
$html = preg_replace($in, $out, $html);
The above example shows only one element in the array but we can have as many elements as we need for our URL transformations.
The session id is usually not necessary. Even if it’s critical to the functionality of your website, it need not be in the URL. Most users have cookies enabled so CMS can store the session id using cookies. The web server appends the session id to the URL the first time a visitor comes to the website (in case the user doesn’t have cookies enabled), but search engines don’t accept cookies so they always get to see the session id! URL rewriting for session maintenance can and should be turned off within your web server settings.
Which CMS Application Do You Use And Where Do You Find Them?
For my purposes, the PostNuke Open Source Content Management System works well. But there are many CMS applications available that are open source and are easy to install. They all have a loyal community base with support forums where you can get your questions answered. To access a review of the various CMS’s available and where you can download them, please have a look at: http://biz-whiz.com/article225.html
Note: In order to run such a system on your web site, your web server will need to provide scripting and database support.
Using Search Engine Friendly Themes
Your CMS system will include several templates (also called themes) that you can use on your website, but most likely they won’t be search engine friendly. With little modification, these can be updated to automatically optimize your pages. When you create an article using CMS, you can specify a title, summary and main body. You can modify the theme you and repeat the title in H1 and ALT tags, in bold and italics, etc. You only have to modify the template once and all the pages of your website become automatically optimized! Now, All you have to do is to choose an appropriate title for each article that you add and your pages will get automatically optimized for the keywords you use in your title!
Site Navigation
Generally SEO’s feel that having the navigation links at the bottom or on the right side of your page allow you to position your optimized content towards the beginning of your html page, but users are accustomed to naturally look for a navigation menu towards the top left of the page. If you want to go with your visitor’s intuition at the cost of placing your navigation links at the top of your HTML code, you need to make sure that the links are well optimized with your keywords. It might not be obvious, but attention to the anchor text used in the navigation links is important because these links will appear on all the pages of your site. If you can, try to have at least one of your important keywords in the link that leads to your main page. i.e. Instead of using "Home" use "Your-Keywords" in the link back to your main page; this will have a big impact on the search engine ranking of your main page.
Topical Islands of Related Content
When you add content to your CMS, you would classify it into a topic. A CMS like PostNuke, allows you to choose a category and a topic for each article that you add. The CMS will automatically create links in the chosen category page and topics page. If you define your topics and your categories properly, you can create a brilliant linking strategy. Since your main page links to your topics page and since each topic page contains links to the articles for that topic, it creates a three level sitemap for the search engine spider to follow. Since each article will have a link back to the main page and to the related topic, you can establish islands of targeted topics, which the search engines love. Without a CMS application, you would have manually create all the links every time you added an article, but when you using a customized CMS application, it all happens automatically.
Conclusion
Setting up a CMS managed website that can achieve good search engine rankings is possible if you take care of the key factors as outlined above. As you have seen a properly customized CMS application can help you to gain top search engine rankings.
About the Author
Mufad has successfully set up a high ranking work at home community portal http://biz-whiz.com using CMS. He provides his clients with a template driven website using a search engine friendly CMS at: http://powersitesystem.com
