Day 15: 5 steps to utilise your CMS for SEO edit

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a major, ongoing concern for any website, and making sure your site is structured and formatted correctly to achieve the best search ranking possible is very important. Luckily, if your site utilises a Content Management system (CMS), you can use its built in features to make sure you are using the best SEO methods.

Here are 5 ways to make sure your CMS site is receiving the best rankings.

1.Control the URL for every page

The automatic URL a CMS creates for the pages on your website won’t always be formatted in a way that the search engines can read, therefore not telling them what’s on the page. This can be a big problem, for as far as the search engine is aware you could be talking about flying bananas, and not something related to your business. However, a CMS site will allow you to manually define the URL for each page, so you can be sure that the URL contains specific keywords for the pages actual content. This will the help the search engines understand the context of your page, which will better inform how it should be ranked. The URL name is always going to be important, as it’s a key factor in creating a web presence.

2.Define Metadata

Metadata is incredibly important for further telling the search engines what is on your page. This includes the title, keywords and description. A CMS provides the capability to define the metadata manually for each page, helping you tell the search engine about your important content.

3.Set up redirects

Creating redirects from one URL to another is something that a CMS site will let you do, making sure anyone trying to access a page which has changed its URL will be sent to the right place. This is especially helpful following a site redesign, which often uses new URLs for new content. Setting up redirects from a page’s old URL to the new URL will make sure the search engines don’t find any broken links and penalise you for this.

4.Broken link reports

A CMS site will inform you any time there’s a broken link. Links to pages that have moved or changed can hurt your search engine ranking, so regularly reviewing these reports and fixing the issues with broken links is essential to make sure you’re getting the best SEO value.

5.Dynamic sitemap

A site map is a page that lists and links to every page of your website. This is essential for the search engines being able to index all your site’s content. A CMS site provides easy functionality for automatically creating and updating dynamic sitemap using XML or HTML. By using this feature, you can ensure that the search engines are always able to access your content and understand your site’s structure.

If you successfully use these features provided by your CMS, you can easily ensure that the search engines will index all the pages on your site, by providing them with all the right information, you will be able to focus your attention on creating great quality and engaging content.

If you have any questions please contact us.