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!

When the Internet was younger, online speed wasn’t as important as it is today. I first started writing for the Internet in 1995. (In case you’ve forgotten what the web looked like back then, take a look at this digitalized version of a 1995 VHS videotape describing the Internet!)

To get online in 1995, one needed a dial-up modem. Connect times could be long, and busy signals were common. Frustration was just part of the game. As dial-up modems began being replaced by DSL services, though, people began getting really tired of slow web page loading and they started to demand faster connection times and expect faster loading of web pages.

By 2006, the demand for speed had increased to the point that approximately 47% of online shoppers insisted on a streamlined checkout process, with 40% of them stating that quick loading time was essential for them to develop brand loyalty.

In 2009, a full 57% of shoppers demanded a rapid checkout, with 52% of them requiring quick loading to develop loyalty to the site and brand. Forty-seven percent of people expected to wait 2 seconds or less for a web page to load, with 61% of consumers who spend $1,500 a year or more online demanding fast-loading pages.

The story gets worse for e-commerce sites that have slow web page loading. Seventy-nine percent of online shoppers, in 2009, were unlikely to buy again from a slow loading site – and 44% of them would tell their friends and family about the bad experience.

Although I have no more recent statistics to share, common sense suggests that people are becoming MORE impatient with site loading times, rather than less.

And that’s not all. In recent years, page speed has become part of the Google algorithm. So, slow web page loading can now hurt rankings.

High rankings should not be the end goal of a business website. But, poor rankings typically mean lower search traffic, which can translate into decreased sales, revenue, profit and ROI.

In November 2009, Search Engine Land announced that, in 2010, page load speed would become one of the 200 or so factors that make up the Google algorithm; a video by Matt Cutts is also included in this article, where he discussed the importance of Google Caffeine, their speedy new web indexing system.

In April 2010, Cutts announced that page speed was now officially part of the Google algorithm. In the Panda update in February 2011, usability became an even more important ranking factor – and page speed is clearly a factor in usability.

So, what should you do next? Step 1 is simple: test page load speed!

You can test page load speed here. Google will prioritize what you need to fix, categorizing them in high, medium and low priority categories. You can also see page load speed in your Google Webmaster Tools account under Labs > Site performance. Other tools to test page load speed include:

• http://websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
• http://tools.pingdom.com/

Google will soon be offering Page Speed Service; right now, it’s in beta and free to selected sites, but it will soon be available to everyone for a fee.

According to Google, “Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, zipping resources or other web performance best practices.”

Sites that use this service are said to be 20 to 60% faster. To see what it can do for your site, Google is providing a WebPage Test service. Since this service is just beginning, no real information is available to help companies decide whether this is right or wrong for them – but it’s good to be informed of the latest news.

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!

Of course, it’s still very early in the year! But, there are three things you can do right now to maintain your company’s good online image; things that show you care about your visitors’ user experience on your website, and not just website ranking. Keep your customers and prospects coming back to your site by following these tips:

1. Make it a priority to add signs of quality to your ecommerce website.

It’s been over six months since we blogged about signs of quality – have you made the time to put these into action for your website? Your visitors will appreciate a site map to easily navigate your site – and, fewer “page not found” (404) errors to frustrate them and possibly make them abandon your site.

2. Test website load times – and keep visitors happy with faster ones.

Not only is page speed one of over 200 signals Google uses for website ranking, it’s also extremely important for site visitors. On average people will wait only about two seconds for a website to load before moving on to a competing site! Download Google’s free page speed tool to see how to test website load times – and then improve them.

3. Help your ecommerce website gain trust by keeping the copyright date current.

If your site’s copyright date doesn’t show 2011, why not? Keeping the date current shows customers and prospects that your site is being maintained and is up to date.

To make things even easier, you can add a small piece of code to your site which will automatically update the copyright date every year for you! The following code can be placed directly on the site or, more commonly, placed in the separate file that contains the footer, which usually houses the copyright date:

<?php echo date("Y") ?>

Simply use this line of code in place of manually typing the year. The code will retrieve the date from the server but will only display the year. That’s all there is to it!

Keep good customers – and gain some new ones! – by maintaining a quality, fast-loading and current ecommerce website!

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.

Manufacturers often provide copy about their products so that retailers can use it to describe those products to potential buyers. Although this copy may be useful to people who arrive at a retail website, manufacturer-created copy causes multiple duplicate content issues from a search engine optimization standpoint.

You may be asking: why should I care if duplicate content issues cause problems for the search engine spiders?

Take a look at search engines from a search engine company’s perspective (Google, Yahoo, Bing and so forth). Each of the search engines want online searchers to choose to use their services, right? To get this to happen, a search engine focuses on providing the best results for each search query; to quote the most successful of the search engine companies about one of the ways that they accomplish this: “Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information.”

To accomplish the goal of providing searchers with distinct information, search engine spiders may not index all pages that appear to have duplicate content – and, when a page is not indexed, it cannot be returned in response to a relevant query being typed into a search box.

In other words, un-indexed pages cannot receive ANY of the traffic generated by people using search engines to find products and services – and that’s a big problem for any company, including yours.

Here, in more detail, is why manufacturer-created copy can cause duplicate content issues for websites.

Descriptions created by manufacturers:

• Tend to be short; search engine spiders typically need at least 150 words of original copy to “get” what a page is about.
• Tend to be similar – or sometimes even identical – to other descriptions within a site; when this happens, search engine spiders may not index all of the product pages.
• Tend to be found on multiple websites; it is therefore likely that only some of the sites using this duplicate content will appear in the search engine results pages in response to relevant queries. Your competitor’s site may be presented in the search results, instead of yours.

Fortunately, The Search Guru provides SEO copywriting tips to combat the problems associated with manufacturer-generated copy.

Our SEO copywriting tips include:

• Prioritize the importance of your pages; this is especially important on a larger site. Top priority pages may include:
  - Landing pages for types of products and/or services
  - Pages featuring products and/or services with larger profit margins
  - Pages featuring products and/or services that form the core of your current sales strategy

• Create original content for as many of your pages as possible, in the order of their importance.
• Optimize the content to help the search engine spiders understand the theme of a page/site, so that YOUR pages can effectively be returned in response to relevant search queries.

Continue to watch The Search Guru blog for more SEO copywriting tips and much more.

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!

Here at The Search Guru blog we’ve posted previous entries discussing canonical issues and how they can cause duplicate content in the search engine index. To refresh your memory, canonicalization is the process of the search engines having to choose the best URL to index when there are several choices. To a search engine, http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com look like two different sites that have exactly the same content, which can trigger the Google duplicate content filter.

One way to address this is by implementing a 301 redirect from the non-preferred to the preferred version of a URL. We show you how to do this on a Unix/Apache server and a Windows server.

Use the canonical element as well to fix Google duplicate content.

The canonical element was introduced by Google about a year ago, but you may not yet realize its power. The canonical element (also referred to as the canonical tag, although it is technically not a tag) shows Google which version of a URL to include in the search engine index.

The canonical element goes in the <head> section of the page and tells Google the preferred URL of the page. The element looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/"/>

Remove duplicate content with the power of the canonical element.

Recently a client’s site contained articles that were accessible through multiple URLs on the site. They wanted to keep this user-friendly feature, but multiple copies of the articles were in the search engine index.

The solution? Determining which URL would be the “main” URL of the article and adding the canonical element to the main and secondary URLs. For instance, http://www.mysite.com/articles/how-to-article was decided to be the main URL. http://www.mysite.com/articles/how-tos/how-to-article was a secondary URL. The canonical element
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite.com/articles/how-to-article"/> was added to both pages to indicate which one should be indexed. Neat, huh?

Keep similar pages out of the search engine index and avoid Google duplicate content.

Duplicate content can really wreak havoc on retail sites, when product pages can be very similar to one another with the same copy and product specs. The only difference in the content may be a size or color. By adding the canonical element to product pages, you can effectively keep Google from indexing similar pages on your site – and keep from getting penalized!

Let’s say your site has 300 pages in the Google search engine index and 315 in the Yahoo! index. Those numbers are pretty close; it looks like both spiders are crawling and indexing most of your content.

But what if your site has 300 pages in Google, and 620 in Yahoo!? This indicates that there may be a deeper issue affecting your site.

Canonical URL, duplicate content and 404 error pages are three common reasons why page counts can differ.

1. Canonical URL

Canonicalization is the process of the search engines having to choose the best URL to index when there are several choices. Two of the most common ways a canonical URL can occur are:

• www vs. non-www
• http vs. https

The search engines can mistake http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com as two different sites with exactly the same content. This is also true for http://www.mysite.com and https://www.mysite.com.

2. Duplicate content

Google duplicate content, and duplicate content in Yahoo!, can occur as a result of a canonical URL as mentioned above. This may trip the Google duplicate content filter which can cause pages from your site, or even your entire site, to be removed from the search engine index.

3. 404 error pages

The Yahoo! search engine index is slower to crawl new pages and therefore tends to hold onto old pages longer than Google. If your site’s index count is inflated in Yahoo!, you may discover that Yahoo! has indexed 404 error pages occurring on your site.

All of these search engine index issues can be corrected using a 301 redirect.

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. Implementing this redirect will correct canonical issues and remove duplicate content and 404 error pages from the indexes.

Find the challenge of fixing these issues daunting? Let The Search Guru technical consultants help. Want to find out what other issues your site may have? Request a free SEO gift session today.

Your website speaks a hidden, coded language. When other computers come to visit, it may give them things like a 200 code, 301 code, 302 code or 404 error message code. Each of these codes are meant to tell a visiting computer what is going on with your site.

So, how often does another computer visit your site? The answer is basically the same number as the number of visitors you get. Your site is really just a computer and your visitors are looking at a computer that talks to your computer and translates what is said. Status code listings are among the ways your site’s computer and your visitor’s computer talk to one another. Search engines are also computers and understanding how to optimize http headers and status code listings will improve your rankings.

200 code – OK

Most pages return a HTTP header status code of 200. This tells a visiting computer that the URL they came to is a good page. There are no problems. A search engine will index this page as usual.

301 code – Permanently moved

If you restructure your site, you may need to rename folders and files. This means that the URL of the old page will no longer work. Visitors may have bookmarked or search engines may have indexed the old URL. You do not want to lose the visitors to the old URL so you need to know how to optimize http headers. A 301 code tells the visiting computer that the page has moved and provides them with the new page. Search engines will update their index and visitors are automatically forwarded to the new page.

302 code – Temporarily moved

If you have problems with your site and you need to move a few pages for a few days, you would use a 302 code. This tells visiting computers that the page is temporarily moved and provides the temporary URL. Search engines will return every few days to see if the page is returned but will not update their indexes. Visitors are automatically forwarded to the temporary page until the 302 code is removed.

404 error message code – Not Found

The dreaded 404 error message code is one that you should try to avoid. A 404 code means that there is no page at the URL the computer is visiting. While search engines will not immediately remove a page from their index if they continue to get a 404 error message code, they will eventually take the URL out.

Besides this, a 404 code reflects poorly on your site. Site with a high number of 404 code pages are considered to be lower quality, which can affect your rankings.

The answer on how to optimize http headers is by providing the correct status code listings.

Never let a page simply return a 404 error message code after you move it or take it down. Using a 301 or 302 code will make sure that no visitors to your site will ever be left with nowhere to go and that search engines know you care about your site.