Search engine optimization is important for any organization hoping to develop a web presence and reach larger audiences. While there are a number of different tricks that you can use to improve your SEO, did you know that your content management system could actually be what’s holding you back? Let’s take a look at how your CMS can impact your SEO efforts, as well as the importance of evaluating your options.
“Underlying code of these designs actually matter to your SEO efforts.”
Customizability is a Must
While the CMS allows for content creation and editing, managers must be able to revise the backend information as well. Data such as the page title, meta description tag, meta keyword tag and H2 tags are all vital elements that Google’s crawlers rely on to rank website relevancy in user searches. Search Engine Watch noted that these fields should be independent of one another, allowing you to customize them without any limitations. The CMS should also provide the capability of auto-populating fields based on custom rules. This could save time and effort while allowing you to go back and change fields when necessary.
Let’s say that you notice certain pages or online assets aren’t performing as well as you’d like. Perhaps the keywords and tags you’re using aren’t gaining enough traction, so you make a strategy to make them more SEO-friendly. Being able to go back into your CMS and change them without worrying about dependencies and default behaviors makes it easier to maintain your site and pursue desired results.
Design Code Matters, Too
It can be easy to get caught up in designing your website to have easy navigation and to look aesthetically pleasing. However, the underlying code of these designs actually matters to your SEO efforts. As iData Technologies noted, search engines don’t look at the actual page, they look at the code. If pages are invisible because of text in images, script-based navigation and other practices, spiders won’t be able to crawl it. Choosing designs from an SEO-friendly CMS will help search engines better understand your site and rank it accordingly in user searches.
Look at the Support Community
Every CMS is different – they each contain varying levels of support and functions to help expand your capabilities. Drupal CMS offers clean URLS and the most user-friendly SEO-enabled templates around. Drupal developers bake in the basics of good SEO and test it across multiple browsers and screen resolutions to ensure that you can reach your audience, Marketing Profs stated. The community also offers a number of plug-ins to simplify the creation of tags and meta descriptions, allowing you to choose the ones that best meet your needs.
It’s also easy to integrate analytics tools into the CMS to track SEO initiatives and gauge how well your keywords are performing. Reporting capabilities can reveal words that are outperforming others, enabling you to create campaigns around these phrases and revise your SEO strategy to include these terms. For more information on how to use your CMS to bolster your SEO efforts, contact Paramount Software Solutions today.
