Traditionally, out-of-the-box web content management systems (also known as a CMS) have a history of not playing nice with organic search engine optimization. Even custom built systems can fall short in SEO-friendliness.

By this we mean that, oftentimes, a web site content management system will be easy enough to use but lacks the control needed over certain important elements for SEO. Let’s take a look at some of the CMS “big rocks” that can impede successful organic search engine optimization for your business.

CMS for business tip #1: Title and meta description tags

Since the title tag is the most important on-page element, it is crucial to have control over this tag. If there are automated “standard” title tags on the site (such as pulling product names from a database) then it is essential that there is a field in the CMS to override the standard with custom written title tags.

Of course, on a large ecommerce site, not every page can have handwritten titles but you will want this option for your most important pages. Same goes for meta description tags – you will want to give top pages that handwritten touch.

CMS for business tip #2: Header tags

Every page on your site should have one H1 tag for the headline or main idea. Ensure that your web site content management system has a field for the H1 (perhaps called “Page Title” or something similar; note that this is different from the title tag) or that an H1 can be inserted within the content field in the body copy. This means that you must be able to enter HTML into the content field. You will also want to include H2 tags for sub-headlines within the body copy.

Note: If your site doesn’t currently use header tags and you put them in, you may be surprised to see that they’re too large or the font or color doesn’t match the style of the site. In this case the header tags need defined within the CSS style sheet.

CMS for business tip #3: Page content

This one may seem obvious: you will need an area in which to enter the body copy for the page. Sometimes more than one content field is needed; for example, you may want to add an opening paragraph of copy near the top of the page, list products that you sell, and then include more copy below the products.

CMS for business tip #4: Navigation

This one may not be so obvious, especially when adding a new page to the site. Where will the new page fit within the site architecture? The CMS should allow you to choose an area of the navigation to add the link to your new page and to specify the anchor text for the link.

CMS for business tip #5: URL formation

This is an element that you may not have control over in the CMS. Ideally you will want to include keywords in the folders and filenames of your URLs for organic search engine optimization. On some web sites this isn’t an option, if URLs are generated automatically.

It is important to note that, as a general rule, once URLs are indexed you shouldn’t change them simply to insert keywords since you will lose the “history” of the URLs in the search engines.

We hope you found this “best practices content management system” post to be helpful. It’s important to note that your developer should be able to make changes to your CMS – just ask!

Too often, when businesses decide to tackle a website redesign, they don’t consider organic search engine optimization as an essential part of the redesign process. Sure, your new site may look appealing – and looks are an important “quality signal” in the post-Panda era – but it’s also got to have SEO mojo to perform and outrank your competitors.

Apply these organic search engine optimization tips to bake SEO into your website redesign.

• Conversion/Sales Goals What are the main conversion goals for the site? Online purchase? Phone call? Newsletter sign-up? Ensure that the paths to these are the first things that draw the eye.
• Title Tags and Meta Description Tags Add unique title and meta description tags to the home page and every page of the site; include a call to action, benefit statement and keyphrases in the tags.
• Content Include a minimum of 250 words, or ideally 300-400 words, of unique copy on the home page and every page of the site. Add one <h1> tag for a headline and at least two <h2> tags for sub-headlines on the home page and every page of the site. Include keyphrases in all header tags. Add links on keyphrases to internal pages within the body content. At the end of articles and blog posts, include links to related URLs to encourage people to remain on your site longer.
• Navigation Include keyphrases in navigation links whenever possible. Use HTML text or CSS for crawlable/indexable links; avoid JavaScript, Ajax and Flash navigation. Include a link to a site map page within the footer of every page.
• Usability Place important text and page elements above the fold (within the first screen length); studies have shown that users often do not scroll long pages. Does the new site have the “stickiness” factor to make visitors want to stay a while? A reduced bounce rate, along with increased page views, will help your site in the post-Panda era.
• URLs It is best not to change the URLs if the site is established and ranking well. If URLs must be revised – or if some current URLs are not yet indexed and so you’ve decided to optimize those URLs – be sure to add 301 redirects to the new URLs. Take advantage of the opportunity to add keyphrases to new URLs, as well.
• Code and Images Streamline the code so the search engine spiders can find and focus on the important information (hint: use CSS and keep it and any JavaScript in external files). If using Google Analytics, ensure the tracking code remains in place during any updates. Include descriptive <alt> tags with keyphrases on all images. Use images sparingly and optimize them for faster load time; page speed is now a Google ranking factor.
• Social Media/Buzz Make social media buttons prominent to encourage sharing. Don’t forget the Google +1 button!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this SEO checklist! Employ these search engine optimization tips to give your website redesign the boost it needs to rank highly in the search engines.

As SEOs, we can think of no better place we want our clients to be than in that number one spot at the top of the Google search engine results page (SERP) for keywords relevant to their businesses. Since it’s not exactly easy to nab that first place, people will usually be happy with any spot on the first page of results.

But have you ever wondered what the difference is in the click-through rate (CTR) from the number one result to the second? In other words, what percentage of clicks does the first result get compared to the second, or third, or fourth, and so on?

Brace yourselves. One study has shown that the second result receives less than half the number of clicks than the first result. Other research puts the number even lower, at about one-third. Still another study shows the click-through rate of spot #2 to be less than 30% of spot #1! And the percentages keep going down the further down the page you go.

In addition, these studies show that the first result gets a click-through rate between 34% and 42%. The second spot gets 12-17% of the clicks. Ouch.

Intent of web searches: navigational, informational or transactional

What these studies don’t take into account are searchers’ intent and their position in the buying cycle. What is the purpose of the web searches? Does that make a difference in the click-through rate of the various positions on the search engine results page? Indeed, it does.

Here are the three types of web searches:

• A navigational search is when a user is looking for a specific site. Most often a search for a company will turn up the company’s website in the first result; therefore navigational searches increase the click-through rate of the first result to about 70%, skewing the aggregate click-through numbers mentioned above. These searchers don’t look beyond the first half of the first page, because they don’t need to.
• An informational search is just what it sounds like; the searcher is looking for specific information. According to this web queries study, more than 80% of searches are informational. Informational searchers will generally bail if they don’t find what they’re looking for in the first few search results. They’ll simply try a different search.
• A transactional search is performed by people who are looking to buy. Interestingly, an eye tracking study found that these searchers will scan much further down the page for results – good news for ecommerce sites. Consider that pre-internet, buyers would generally obtain a minimum of three bids or prices before making a purchase decision, and it seems that behavior continues online.

Businesses who know their online audience will be better able to target one or more of these types of web searches. Monitoring CTR and impressions through Google Webmaster Tools can provide additional insight as well.

Step 1: Register your site with Google’s free webmaster tools

A Google webmaster tools account is essential in order to rank highly on the search engine results page and achieve maximum click-through rate. These tools allow you to monitor your site’s performance in Google’s index and optimize visibility. If you are a webmaster and haven’t registered your site with Google webmaster tools, that is the first step; if you already have a free webmaster tools account, proceed to Step 2!

Step 2: Free webmaster tools spotlight

After logging into your account, you’ll see navigational links on the left; here we highlight a few of the most helpful tools:

Site configuration > Sitemaps

Your site should include a site map written specifically for the search engines: a sitemap.xml file. This file contains every URL on your site; submit your sitemap.xml file here to help Google more completely index your site.

Site configuration > Settings

Here you can tell Google your preferred canonical domain, which can help prevent a canonical issue on your site. You can also set a geographic target and crawl rate, if desired.

Your site on the web > Search queries

Study this section to see the top keywords for which your site is receiving traffic. Google’s free webmaster tools also displays the number of impressions (the number of times your site appears on a search engine results page), the average position and the click-through rate for each keyword.

Your site on the web > Links to your site

See which sites are linking to yours the most, which URLs they’re linking to, and what anchor text they’re using in the links.

Diagnostics > Crawl errors

Examine this area to find issues Google encountered while crawling your site, such as 404 errors.

Diagnostics > HTML suggestions

Google lists issues with tags, such as missing and duplicate title and meta description tags, and tags that are too long or too short. Duplicate tags can be caused by using the same tag on more than one page, or by a canonical issue.

Labs > Site performance

With site speed being one of Google’s ranking signals, it’s important to monitor how fast your pages are loading. This section includes a link to install the Page Speed plug-in for Firefox. You can also now obtain these same metrics using Google’s handy new Page Speed Online tool.

Step 3: Enjoy taking control of your site by taking advantage of these powerful free webmaster tools!

On February 24, Google blogged about what they called “a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking,” one that affected a whopping 11.8% of search queries. According to the blog post by Google, the goal of this update was to “reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

On the upside, Google promises that this will result in “better rankings for high-quality sites – sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis.” Note that, so far, this update has only been put into play in the United States.

This Google algorithm change is part two of a one-two punch by the search engine giant to downgrade sites with low quality content to let good content shine.

On January 21, Google revealed that it was about to take action on two different kinds of sites: scraper sites (although that term was not used in this particular post) and content farms (a term that was used in this post). The goal of the upcoming updates, Google explained, was to reduce webspam, which is the “junk you see in search results when websites try to cheat their way into higher positions in search results or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines.”

About one week later, the first of two updates took place, where Google took action against scraper sites, which are spammy websites that copy content from other sites; the goal of web scrapers is typically to try to earn advertising revenue quickly and easily.

If you haven’t already read our analysis on web content writing posted in response to that first Google algorithm change, consider doing so, now.

What should your response be to these algorithmic changes? How should it alter your web content writing strategy?

If you’ve been reading blog posts and/or e-newsletters from The Search Guru, you already know that we’re a huge advocate of writing fresh, original, relevant content for your site. Now, it’s more important than ever.

Inspiration for great article ideas is all around you. Here are some tips:

1) What questions do your customers or clients ask you? Craft a thoughtful useful response to these questions and use each question/response as a blog post and/or an article on your site.

2) Do you have access to customer surveys? What jumps out at you as a customer concern? What content can you create to address those concerns?

3) What stories in the news affect your business and, by extension, your customers? Write a thoughtful analysis of the impact on your customers and, again, turn it into a blog post or article.

4) Interview people who work at your business and turn their responses into an article. This will help you put a human face on your business, the first step towards building deeper relationships.

5) Interview customers and feature them in articles. What problem led them to seek out your business? What solutions did you provide them? What next steps exist for this customer? What advice would this customer have for other people in the same type of situation?

6) In these articles and/or blog posts, avoid being overly promotional. Instead, use them as opportunities to educate potential clients; the goal is that, when the time comes for them to make a purchase, they will remember the quality info that you have provided and come to your site when it’s time to buy. Put any promotional blurb at the end of the article.

Do you need support in your web content writing? Take advantage of a FREE 30-minute consultation with The Search Guru.

You’ll love having our expert team assist you in generating great article ideas that will provide useful info your customers love and will help you to have the fresh, original, relevant content that Google rewards.

There has been a lot of talk in the media about how building web content has become big business. This talk has been fueled largely by the impending IPO of Demand Media, a mass content farm that churns out an unimaginable amount of web content every day. So, how does this affect you in determining web site content? Here’s why: because most of that talk has not been positive and the Google search algorithm has been changing as a result.

Determining if web site content is good or bad

The reason Demand Media is causing such a ruckus is because they are building web content that is poor – at least according to well paid journalists and writers. Demand Media’s business model is to pay very little for a “writer” (in many cases untrained stay-at-home moms and other people who are happy to make a part time living from home) to churn out a quick, uniquely written article that focuses on one long tail keyphrase.

This tactic works because no one targets long tail keyphrases with original content. This niche has traditionally been filled by what is known as slice and dice database web sites. These are web sites that take a database and “slice and dice” the data to build thousands, sometimes millions, of pages in a very quick period of time. Technically many ecommerce web sites fall into this category.

The news frenzy around Demand Media’s IPO has caused many reporters to look closely at the Google search results and their conclusion is that the search results are full of useless information. These reporters meant to tarnish the reputation of Demand Media (as it was their content they found to be useless), but the overall effect was that Google also took a look at what makes good and bad content.

How this affects duplicate content in Google

While Google does not yet have the technology for determining if web site content is good or bad, they can take a good, close look at different kinds of duplicate content in Google search results and whether this kind of content is helpful to their users. We all know that whole articles copied and duplicated is bad for SEO, but what about an ecommerce site that uses database content provided by a product manufacturer that hundreds of other sites use? What about a site that aggregates and displays excerpts from press releases, articles and blog posts? What about sites that provide addresses, phone numbers and other contact information that is available on many other sites?

In the past, this partial duplicate content did all right in Google. Page content that only used a little duplicate content could combine that data with text or important words and bring in a decent amount of traffic from long tail keyphrases.

This is changing. The past three major Google search algorithm tweaks have been aimed directly at sites that use these kinds of duplicate content. The latest tweak happened just last week and Matt Cutts has stated that the hunt for ways to weed out “poor” and non-unique content is not over.

What this means to you when building web content

These changes from Google indicate that the days of riding on content provided by other companies and sites is coming to an end. If you want good search traffic, you need good, unique content.

Writing unique content can be a daunting task, especially if you have an ecommerce site with thousands of products. But you do not have to face this task alone. We here at The Search Guru can help you with determining a web site content strategy that will work for your company, budget and resources. Whether it’s helping you write the content or training your staff to effectively write the content themselves, The Search Guru is happy to be your partner. Contact us today to find out how we can help your business write unique, SEO friendly content that will help skyrocket your search traffic.

Note: This latest algorithm change is related to blocking low quality content scraper sites and not content farms. The so-called “content farm algorithm” is yet to be released.

1. Resolve to make continuing education a part of your work day. In the world of SEO, search engine algorithms are always changing – and so are the techniques needed for successful SEO. Need a refresher on how search engines work? Look no further!

• How search engines work, part 1
• How search engines work, part 2
• How search engines work, part 3

2. Commit to prioritizing small projects that can make a big difference in your search engine optimization campaign, such as:

• Fixing canonical issues
• Adding sitemaps
• Adding a robots.txt
• Fixing 404 errors
• Using the 301 redirect

3. Choose strategies that will help to boost your 2011 sales leads, including through organic search engine optimization.

4. Update keyword research at least once a year, more often if you’re in a rapidly changing industry.

5. Boost online conversion strategies through the use of an on-site conversion audit.

6. Continue to add fresh, relevant, optimized content to your website for more successful SEO. To help you do so, here are:

• Ways to eliminate duplicate content
• Business copywriting tips; remember that, at the heart of excellent SEO copy is a piece of outstanding copy!
• Methods to freshen organic search engine optimization to supercharge your copy

7. Strengthen internal linking to provide search engine spiders clear cues as to the themes of your content; this helps pages get indexed and then returned in response to relevant queries.

8. Sweeten your reputation on the Internet through effective online reputation management and by writing the perfect business apology letter.

9. Effectively manage your PPC account. Discover more about:

• Pay per click management terms
• PPC share of voice
• Value of manual pay per click management

10. Add video to your successful SEO arsenal. Find helpful info about:

• Choosing the best digital camcorder
• Easy video editing
• How to set up a YouTube account
• YouTube account customization, part 1
• YouTube account customization, part 2

11. Expand your link building strategies.

12. Start planning for the 2011 holidays! Here are some tips on holiday PPC marketing.

So, there you have it: a list of New Year’s resolutions that will help you to boost conversions and sales for a prosperous 2011. Happy New Year!

• A year where Google’s algorithm changes reward you for all of the hard work you’ve been doing in 2010 (or, if SEO is new to you, a year where you create a successful SEO strategy that you can continue into 2012 and beyond)
• A social media presence where you have meaningful conversations with your customers and potential customers
• A year of positive online reputation, where your customers tell others about your quality products and services, competitive pricing and fast friendly service
• A year where you meet and exceed your business goals and fulfill your dreams!

As our gift to you, here are free SEO resources to use in 2011 to help you find the success you deserve:

• First, check out the list of free SEO resources found right here at The Search Guru
• If you’re receiving our newsletter from a friend or colleague, head to our home page where you just need to sign up for our free newsletter – and then receive a free 14-page whitepaper
• Download our free Internet brand management whitepaper today!
• Ready to talk about what The Search Guru can do for your business? Request our free SEO 30-minute gift session.

Please accept our New Year’s wishes for the happiest, healthiest and most prosperous year ever in 2011!

Are you making New Year’s resolutions this year? If so, you might be interested in discovering that the tradition was started by Ancient Babylonians, who were urged to return any borrowed items by the end of the year, so that the new year could begin with a clean slate!

Tip #1 to improve ranking of a website: Adhere to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization that oversees the standards for the internet and internet coding. Having code that meets W3C standards is considered to be a “sign of quality.” It is thought that having signs of quality on a website can help with rankings in the search engines. Therefore having fewer W3C validation errors means that your site could gain a higher Google website ranking.

To help meet W3C standards, follow best practices, such as formatting your site with CSS rather than HTML tables, avoiding using deprecated (outdated) code, and so forth.

Tip #2 to improve ranking of a website: Add a robots.txt file to the root domain

A robots.txt is a plain text file that tells the search engines where they are not allowed to go on a site. Having a robots.txt file, even a blank one, is considered to be a sign of quality. It shows that you acknowledge that search engines are allowed on your site and that they may have free access to it. Learn how to add a robots.txt file to your site.

Tip #3 to improve ranking of a website: Correct 404 errors on the site

This may seem like a small thing, but 404 errors (broken links or pages not found) do reflect upon the quality of the site, which has some bearing on website ranking. Correcting 404 errors shows that your site is up to date and is being maintained. We recommend that you routinely review the site for these errors and correct them whenever possible.

Tip #4 to improve ranking of a website: Create a search engine sitemap.xml file

Search engines love site maps, as they help them index sites more completely and efficiently. Having a standard site map page is a must, but you also want to have a site map written specifically for the search engines: a sitemap.xml file. This file contains every URL on your site and should be submitted to your Google Webmaster Tools account to increase your Google website ranking. Check out sites such as XML-Sitemaps.com to create your free sitemap.xml file.

Organic SEO tip #1: Examine on-page elements

On-page elements are the elements that affect organic search engine optimization that can be controlled by the designer or developer. Use the following checklist to help increase online sales leads to your website.

Title tags (the single most important on-page element). The title tag is like the headline of your advertisement in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The title tag should:

• Be unique and relevant to the page topic
• Contain keywords, a benefit statement and a call to action

Header tags (the second most important on-page element). Header tags (also called H tags) highlight important text for the search engines. H tags should:

• Be used on every page
• Highlight the main idea or headline (H1)
• Highlight secondary ideas or sub-headlines (H2)

Meta description tags. The meta description tag is like the body of your advertisement in the SERPs. The meta description tag should:

• Be unique and relevant to the page topic
• Be written succinctly in paragraph form
• Contain keywords, benefit statements and calls to action

Website basics. These basic elements are crucial for organic search engine optimization. Make sure your website includes all of these elements:

• Robots.txt file
• Site map
• Sitemap.xml file

Clean up basics. These all have some bearing on search engine rankings. Examine your website to see if you need to:

• Correct 404 errors
• Clean up HTML code
• Compress images
• Add ALT tags to images

Organic SEO tip #2: Examine off-page elements

Off-page elements are the elements that affect organic search engine optimization that cannot be controlled by the designer or developer. These include elements of a good link building campaign – the quality of your inbound links and the anchor text linking back to your website. When was the last time you freshened up your link building campaign?

Generating sales leads is easier when you use these proven SEO strategies to support your organic search engine optimization efforts!