molly.com
Thursday 30 December 2004
marquis: seo for cms
CMS PROBLEMS AREN’T just related to non-standard markup. According to a white paper provided by Marquis: The Marketer’s Guide to Optimizing Your Web Content for Search Engines CMSs can be doing a lot more to help with your search engine optimization. The advice is mostly good, with a few head-scratchers along the way.
I can recommend the white paper as an easy read with mostly solid information. It’s a practical guide as to what should be included in a CMS to assist with better search engine optimization (SEO) practices. Here’s a sample of some of the advice provided, along with my thoughts on that advice:
- Link quality is more important than quantity. This is in reference to inbound links specifically - the more highly trafficked sites that are linking to you, the better.
metaelements. While not as weighted as they once were (and in some cases not part of a search algorithm at all), it’s still important to use meta descriptions and keywords.- Dynamic pages have difficulty with certain URL strings, particularly those that contain a “?”. Well here’s one I didn’t know! Cool, and according to the white paper, a good CMS is one that will create friendlier URLs, which can’t be anything but positive.
- alt text. Okay, Marquis bothers me here. First they used the term “Alt Tag.” Gack! One more time for the masses: There’s no such thing as an “Alt Tag.” It is an attribute. Moving on from that, the advice Marquis provides is to add alternative text to all images other than those that are purely visual. Well, you can’t leave the
altattribute out of any inline image and pass muster validation-wise, much less accessibility-wise. The alternative is obvious to me: Design with CSS so your design-centric images are in backgrounds anyway. Otherwise, you must have thealtattribute in yourimgelements, even if you choose not to include any descriptive text. - Place JavaScripts in external files. Excellent advice for numerous reasons: Better document management (you can create shared libraries for common scripts); you reduce page weight; and you please the search engines, who don’t like lots of data before actual content.
- Use large font sizing or headers for important text, and emphasis important keywords with bold and italics. How about we adjust that to simply this: Use headers semantically, and you can’t go wrong. Ditch the inline font sizing - there’s just no excuse to be using inline
fontelements anymore. Emphasize only those items that really are emphatic, otherwise it begins to affect readability. - A good CMS will allow the use of CSS without restriction on design or layout. Well of course.
- Avoid negative values to shift text off the visible page or hidden text of any kind. I didn’t know about the negative values concern, but apparently these techniques can cause a spam alert to many search engines. The problem here in terms of progressive design has to do with image replacement - a complex issue in and of itself and sadly, the accessibility and SEO concerns do conflict with what is, at least conceptually, a very useful CSS technique.
This line regarding tables just jumped out and gave me a heart attack:
“Find a CMS that allows you to pull your tables directly in from Microsoft Word”
So while my faith might be undergoing some challenges, I can say I recognize evil when I see it! Fortunately, the rest of the paper is mostly lucid and will serve anyone looking to evaluate a CMS for SEO support.
Filed under: standards, software, blog slut
Posted by: Molly | 10:42 am |
December 30th, 2004 at 11:39 am
Avoiding the negative or hidden text kinda stinks, but there are ways around it. Be sure to visit the reduced page. We live in a world of constant hacks, browser specific markup and the knowledge that there will always be a viewer out there that will always find a flaw.
December 30th, 2004 at 5:56 pm
All he was missing was the end of the sentence. “Find a CMS that allows you to pull your tables directly in from Microsoft Word and will clean out all the crap for you, leaving clean, semantic code.”
December 30th, 2004 at 7:13 pm
Google Suggests More Blogging
Scott and I have been talking to the press lately about business blogging — the articles are forthcoming — and the reporters always ask about metrics. I usually describe how a market found us on Google, our response to…
December 30th, 2004 at 8:13 pm
Just a comment about the table thing: any table in Word is more than likely going to be for tabular data. For that reason, it would be a huge asset that any CMS would pull it out appropriately. But as Sheldon mentions, it should also be able to strip out all the crappy HTML word puts in there (which a number of recent editors/CMS’s do).
ps: I like the new site redesign and ponders how to get on the blogroll.
December 31st, 2004 at 1:37 am
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the SEO article, especially on CSS.
Regarding the difficulty with questions marks (?) in the URL, Google, Yahoo, and others have no problem with mine or Amazons for that matter. The problem I’ve seen is when the dynamic page’s URL gets to be too deep (i.e. too many session ID’s and/or question marks).
January 4th, 2005 at 8:45 pm
I am not aware of any SE reading external CSS files yet. And even if they would, you can always block them from doing so in your robots.txt. All “good” SEs that you would care about follow robots.txt guidelines very well (except for the Ask, it sometimes gets confused, but it probably doesn’t even care about the negatives).
January 24th, 2005 at 12:24 am
SEO for CMS
Marqui’s The Marketer’s Guide to Optimizing Your Web Content for Search Engines. These are all valid points, however I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t a CMS that handles these things for us users who don’t want to mess around with CSS, JavaS…
March 22nd, 2005 at 11:52 pm
I think that cms software in our days, really do the work. In the past that piece of software was really expensive, but now, there are many cms examples at low cost and with superb advanced features, and of course totally full SEO compatible.
January 23rd, 2006 at 9:17 pm
Any table in Word is more than likely going to be for tabular data. For that reason, it would be a huge asset that any CMS would pull it out appropriately.
November 26th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
Bravo for finally telling people proper SEO in an unbiased way.
Regarding software for CMS, unfortunately there is nothing out there I have found that doesn’t need some work. Most of the attributes you have to add or change are in the include folder, the header, fottor, right navigation, left navigation, and I have even found some that have a META file in the include forlder..
Of most importance to everybody reading this is always use the h1 tag for your Title which shows up at the top of your page, the part that is what your users will see. Now there is nothing wrong with Tables if you include good text in the upper right first cell of your table. Make sure this text has good keyword placement.
November 26th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
Correction to my comment above, regarding tables. Uppr leftmost first cell not upper right.
January 9th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
A lot of this comes down to good template design - not really the responsibility of the CMS.
The CMS should be able to provide you with the ability to customise the title, heading, URL, meta tags and page content. This is the basic SEO requirement from a CMS - without this, you can’t do your on-page optimisation properly.
Other features to look for are smart detection of duplicate content, 301 redirects used whenever page content moves, automatic generation of sitemaps and text based navigation.
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