Content management systems and SEO

In the past I have already experienced a number of evaluations for content management systems for different purposes, including a couple of personal websites, small company websites or even large online portals. Of course, the content section of your website or your website as a whole (if you fully run it using a content management system) should be optimized for search engines as good as possible. Most of the current content management systems have options for SEO already implemented, for others there are lots of plugins that help with this matter. But as I have made some really bad experiences with age-old content management systems in the past (where you automatically got an ugly URL with tons of parameters and were not able to define your favored title, h-tags, description, etc.) the SEO aspect of a CMS is even more important for me. That is why this article about five important CMS tips for large companies from a SEO point of view was really interesting to me. I found tip number 3 quite nice: Including brief infos for your online editors on how to use several tags, find the perfect title, write a good description, etc. seems like a really helpful thing to me!

Easy SEO for your own website: Creating a sitemap.xml file

In my opinion, the most important factors in SEO are content, backlinks and structure. Building a new website with a well-thought site structure will help users as well as search engines to smoothly navigate through your site and spider one page after the other. Quite nice, but no matter how clear the site structure may be, I would always recommend creating a sitemap.xml. This is a file which lists the URLs of your pages in a way that bots can handle them properly and also gives them additional information, e.g. how often the pages are updated, how important they are compared to the other pages of your site, etc. The sitemap.xml follows the XML schema for sitemap protocols which all major search engines agreed on. Depending on the system you use, there are different ways to create such a sitemap.xml file: If you build the website by yourself, you can create and update the sitemap.xml file manually using a web development tool or a simple text editor. Going this way, you always have to keep in mind that you have to make every change (e.g. creating new pages, deleting old pages, etc.) manually. Remember, always stick to the XML schema for sitemap protocols. Otherwise, bots are not going to be able to read your sitemap.xml. You can also implement a service that generates a current version of your sitemap.xml in a time interval that you define. Using a CMS like WordPress, it’s much easier: There are many helpful plugins for this job – you will find a sitemap XML generator in a few minutes. Most plugins offer various customization possibilities – e.g. to define the time interval in which a new sitemap.xml is being generated, to exclude certain page types, etc. Using Google Webmaster Tools you can inform Google that you provide a sitemap.xml for your site. In my next blog post, I will tell you why it is highly important to have a robots.txt file and how to connect it with your sitemap.xml file.

The perfect domain name

Fine roundup of the key factors of ideal domain names on promotionworld.com: The perfect domain name should be short and simple as possible, while being unique and also suggestive for your business category. A crucial point especially if your domain name should perform internationally: It should be easy to interpret and pronounce as well as being as easy to spell as possible for the users in your key markets!

Hands-on tips for link building

Very interesting read that shows a simple strategy for building links: First of all, list your own USPs – think about the reasons why someone should link to your website. Do you have interesting, unique content, that readers can benefit from? Then, find the links you want, e.g. via Google Search. You can also hit the similar pages link to find more interesting results. After that, check the quality of the page that you want to receive a link from. If it does not appear in SERPs at all, don’t even go for it. Also, check how many incoming and outgoing links the page has. Finally, go get the links! Write or call the webmaster, comment blogs, send them traffic, etc. to get noticed http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hands-on-tips-for-link-building

Multiple domains vs. subdomains vs. folders

This extremely useful article shows the advantages and disadvantages of various possibilities to structure a website. While going for a different domain (e.g. domain.fr instead of domain.com) to easily geo target for a foreign market might be a great advantage, no authority or trust is being passed by the domain that already exists, which obviously is a huge disadvantage. Like always, first of all you should focus on your goals – what do you want to achieve now, where do you want to be in five years? A clear and constant website architecture is a make or break for SEO, so I really recommend you to read the whole article, which also has a very clear short summary at the end http://www.webseoanalytics.com/blog/multiple-domains-vs-subdomains-vs-folders-in-seo/

10 SEO mistakes you can simply avoid

Always think about your visitors: What are they looking for and where are they from? Therefore, spend time on researching the right keywords to optimize your pages for and always focus on keyphrases that feature location information, if that’s important for your website. If you don’t care about these essential thoughts, all further efforts would be useless. Keep in mind to focus on the best anchor texts for your links and look out for quality links over quantity links. And as mentioned before many times, write unique content that’s worth reading. This article shows you many common mistakes and how to tackle these topics http://blog.kissmetrics.com/seo-mistakes/

How to properly rename a domain

You want to change a domain name from example.com to anotherexample.com and wonder which is the best way to do that from a SEO point of view? First of all, use a HTTP status code 301 redirect to redirect all your old pages (that means every single one!) permanently to the new ones. After that, check both external as well as internal links to pages on your site and be sure they point to the new domain name. Plus, create and submit (Google Webmaster Tools also helps here!) a sitemap.xml of your site. More on that here: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/3399/renaming-a-domain-and-preserving-pagerank

5 easy tips to improve website visibility

Short introduction to SEO that covers five important non-tech ranking factors: First of all, think about the keyword or phrase you want to optimize the page for – every page has its own reason to exist and therefore has to be optimized uniquely. Ensure that every page has a unique title and description tag. Think about the best possible link texts – never ever name a link text “click here”. Update your website regularly, and as mentioned in many posts before: Always write absolutely unique content (now after the Google Panda update more important than ever before) http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/blog/5-easy-tips-to-improve-website-visibility/

Optimizing product pages

Another interesting read on how to optimize product pages found on www.vertical-leap.co.uk: A product page SEO checklist. But, as in many other cases, this does not only affect your rankings in search engines but also so many other areas such as – helpful and interesting product descriptions is a must that positively affects SEO, usability, user experience, conversion, … and finally, profit http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/blog/product-page-seo-tips/