SEO is always going to be important to your firm’s bottom line, so it is important for your CMS to make doing SEO easy. Even if you are not an SEO pro yourself, SEO is probably still a part of your job. If you interact at all with your CMS, you are going to be somewhat involved in your SEO.
If you use a content management system for your Website, you want good rankings in Google. And you want your CMS to make SEO as efficient as you can. So, does your CMS do this, or does it make SEO harder.
Your CMS should have the following features to make doing SEO easier:
- It creates intuitive navigation. A simple site navigation makes it easier for a user to get around and this helps to boost rankings. Navigation is important because people will stay longer if they can find what they want. Be sure your CMS can be used to easily organize site navigation.
- It creates links easily. Every page on your website should have links to other pages on your site. The goal of inbound links is to get people to stay longer on your site. Most good CMS editors have easy ways to insert links and to fine tune anchor text.
- It keeps your robot.txt clean. Most CMS products today do not mess around with a site’s robot.txt file. This file has vital instructions for the search engines. Your CMS should provide you with access to this important file so you can be sure your site is properly indexed.
- It allows easy file edits and image information. Adding a file or image on a site is common. But it is not as common for the images to be named with names the search engines like. Your CMS should let you upload images with custom names, and then alter the alt text/tags.
- It should allow you to create titles and descriptions. Two key SEO features on a web page are description and title. Some CMS platforms make it impossible to change this. Other makes changing it difficult.
- It uses headline tags. WYSIWYG is nice, but they can make hurdles for the proper use of header tags. H1, H2 and H3 tags are important for search engines. They tell the crawler what is important on the page. Any keyword presence in your headlines can boost your SEO.
So there you have it. Whether you are focusing on local SEO or global SEO, a CMS with these features will make your SEO job easier.
