Eight Ways a CMS Can Help with Search Engine Optimization

If you want your site to show up prominently in search engines like Google, your website content management system can help - but not all CMSs are created equal. We suggest the features to look for to help with search engine optimization. 

Is your Web site set up in such a way that new pages and content automatically show up prominently in search engines like Google? If not, you may wish to enlist an ally — your content management system. A content management system (or CMS) is the software package that allows you to add content to and update your Web site. Yet not all CMSs are created equal: while some can make search engine optimization (SEO) an easy and natural part of your workflow, less SEO-friendly systems can make you fight every step of the way to implement common optimization practices.

In our article 10 Steps to Being Found on Search Engines [2], we took a look at basic search engine optimization strategies. In this follow-up piece, we go one step further, with the assumption that you’re now familiar with the basic best practices. If you’re using (or looking for) a content management system, what features should it provide to help with search engine optimization? We spoke to four nonprofit technology consultants who specialize in helping nonprofits set up and implement CMSs, and share their eight most important tips below.

Plan Your SEO Strategy Upfront.

First and foremost, no CMS will replace the need for you to define your search engine optimization strategy. While a good CMS might provide a structure and setup that is more conducive to search engine optimization out-of-the-box, any package will require some thought and configuration to align your site with best SEO practices. Ideally, you should account for SEO during your initial site design and configuration phases, as trying to retrofit an existing system to match a new optimization strategy can be quite time-consuming.

Look To Each Page’s Web Address.

The consultants we talked to agreed: the most important thing a content management system can provide in the area of search engine optimization is human-readable URLs (the filename and filepath that make up each Web page’s address). Many content management systems create URLs that are by default a long stream of gibberish, which does nothing to help the search optimization of the page, and may do a fair amount to harm it.

A number of systems have plug-ins or additional modules that can help make URLs more user-friendly. Try to make sure that your URLs are:

• Permanent. Each page should have an address that won’t change over time.
• At your organization’s domain. If you’re using a content management system that is hosted by someone else, make sure that all your pages will appear at your own domain — at "www.nonprofit.org/article.html," as opposed to having important content use your vendor’s domain name — such as "www.yourvendor.org/article.html."
• Useful by default. If each URL has to be individually customized to be SEO-friendly, there’s a sizable chance that this step will eventually fall by the wayside. Ideally, a page's URL should default to something reasonably friendly — like the page title, for instance, as is customary with many blogging packages — without your content creators having to tweak anything manually.
• Individually customizable. While creating sensical URLs by default is important, it’s also useful to be able to tweak the URL by hand to fine-tune the file names. This requires some kind of interface or mechanism to update the file name independently from the page title that is shown to visitors.

Finally, make sure that configuring your content management system to accept these types of best practices won’t break other content management functionality. For some systems, automatically generated URLs are an important part of the way the system manages pages, and customizing them can have unforeseen consequences.

Ensure Templates Use clean, Standard Code.

Whether you’re using the basic page templates provided by the content management system, building your own, or — especially — using a template that’s provided free of charge from an open-source community member, make sure that the template’s code is solid and clean. Verify that the code follows established standards so that search engine spiders can easily read it (the W3C validation tool can be helpful with this), and isn’t filled with extraneous code that might distract them.

It can be quite helpful as well to make sure that the template uses standard header formatting tags — such as H1 for the page title and H2 for sub-heads — so that spiders can easily understand the information hierarchy of the site.

Consider Metatag Customization.

As discussed in our introductory article, page metadata — for instance the page title and description — can be helpful for optimization, and often are displayed to visitors as part of search engine results. Look for content management features that will allow your business users to easily create these tags separately for each page. As with URLs, it’s best to have the system automatically default this metadata to something useful at the site or template level, but it’s also helpful to be able to tweak it by hand on occasion (perhaps, for instance, to have the title in the metatag different than the page title contained in your H1 header).

Look for Automatically Created Site Maps.

A simple, traditional site map — perhaps an outline of your site with links to most of your pages, made available through your main navigation — can help both spiders and site visitors find your pages. In addition, Google allows organizations to submit an XML format site map, which can help ensure that your site is indexed.

A content management system can make it easy to generate both of these kinds of site maps. A CMS that will automatically update your site map whenever a user adds a page provides a way to help the search engines automatically find your new pages.

Ensure Robot Control.

Search-engine spiders typically look for any instructions you might have for them in a text file called “robots.txt,” which sits on your home directory, and via a “robots” metatag on each page. These instructions can be very helpful, especially in telling search engines what not to index — for instance, if you have both a traditional and a print version of each page, you might ask the spiders to only index the traditional version (and thus avoid a possible penalty from the search engine for duplicate content).

Ensure that your content management allows you to control this “robots” information. Some systems essentially block access to them, making it impossible to take advantage of these standards.

Consider Community-created Content.

Search engines love community-created content, like comments, blogs, or wikis. This content tends to be meaty and substantive, full of keywords, easy to link to, and laid out in a straightforward site architecture — all things that are great for search engine optimization. Many content management systems can provide features that make it easy for visitors to create content on your site. This isn’t the right strategy for every site, but it’s one worth keeping in mind.

Tracking the Success of Your SEO Strategy.

Last but certainly not least, make sure that your CMS will allow you to effectively track who’s coming to your site and what keywords they used to get there. Many of the analytics tools that provide this information — for instance, Google Analytics — require you to paste a chunk of code into every page on your site. While this isn’t a problem for most CMSs, ensure that yours allows you enough access to your template to paste in the code.

If you want to track the success of Google AdWords campaigns, you’ll have an additional requirement: You’ll want to add a specific piece of code to a specific transactional page (for instance, a thank-you page) in order to track the conversion rate of your ad. This can get a little trickier; if you’ll be using AdWords, the ability to paste in code for a specific page should be on your list of questions to ask when considering a CMS.

A content management system can be a strong ally in your efforts to be placed well in the search engines, or it can be a substantial barrier. By looking carefully at the features provided and thinking through your search engine optimization strategy upfront, you can make sure your CMS is a friend rather than a hurdle in the process.

Thanks to the nonprofit technology professionals who lent their time and expertise for this article:

• Kevin Gottesman, Gott Advertising [3]
• Rachel Weidinger, Common Knowledge [4]
• Jeff Cram, ISITE Design [5]
• Chris Steins, Urban Insight [6]
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