Search engine optimization (SEO) is a topic that we could spend days and days and days on until we’re blue in the face but we’ll keep it brief here. Out of the box a content management system (CMS) could kill you - especially if you’re redoing your current site with any kind of search engine ranking. Fortunately though, you don’t have to get killed and it’s easy to avoid it.
There are a few simple things that you can do to make sure that your site is compliant and you will not be overlooked by search engines. Most CMS’s, by default, access your database to grab content and they do this through the URL. Unfortunately the URLs tend to look like the following:
http://www.yoursite.com?note=6
This just isn’t good for SEO but it can be easily fixed so that the URL of the same page appears as follows:
http://www.yoursite.com/contact.html
In addition to URLs, it is important to be extra-dilligent in your use of “header tags”, something that is usually taken care of by your attentive web developer. Now that you’re running the show through your new CMS, it is up to you to make sure you understand how, where and when to use the appropriate headers so tha your page gets seen.
Again we’re just skimming the surface here but the long and short of it is that half of the work is building a website and the other half of it is making sure that it can be seen by search engines. There is a myth out there that states that using a CMS will kill your SEO - that is simply not true. If not properly deployed, developed and configured, you could run into problems but with a little bit of care and attention to detail you will have no problems.
Related article: SEO and CMS:How will a CMS impact my SEO efforts? from iData Technologies.
