Top Search Engine Ranking Using Content Management Systems
Copyright © 2004, Mufad
What Is A CMS?
A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to add, edit or
delete content to your website without having to create and
format the pages manually. All the pages get generated on the
fly, the CMS application picks the template, adds the headers
and footers, generates the menus and blocks for your page and
then automatically renders the page. As an example, when I
wanted to add Google ads to all the pages of my CMS site, I
created a block with the Google Adsense code. When I activated
it, it automatically appeared on all my pages. If I had to do
this page by page, it would have been a nightmare (since my
site contains thousands of pages)!
The main reason people hesitate to use CMS is because they
think a CMS site will not perform well with search engines.
But when used properly, CMS can actually help with scoring
points with the search engines. This article shows you how.
We all know that content is king and that the primary function
of today's Internet is to deliver content to those that are
seeking it. Most people who do Search Engine Optimization know
that the secret to high ranking on the search engines is to get
links from external sites, but that's only half the story. The
other face of the SEO coin is to have many internal content
pages that point to your main page, thereby increasing the
link popularity of that page. CMS allows you to easily manage
multiple pages on your site, categorized into appropriate
topics and categories.
If you run a community site, CMS allows visitors to submit
content, which can later be reviewed and approved by a moderator.
Such a system can lead to exponential growth of your website and
can be very effective if the quality of the content is
maintained.
While it is a fact that most free CMS's available were not
designed with the search engine spider in mind, CMS applications
are flexible and can be tweaked to help you gain a top rankings
with search engines.
How Do You Customize A CMS Application To Improve Search Engine
Rankings?
First, there is the issue of dynamic URLs. Most CMS's will
generate URLs with parameters embedded into them. As an example,
each article link on your site may look like this:
http://yoursite.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article
&sid=35&SESSIONID=200dbf5df81843102bc2ba2560207841
Not only does it look ugly, the search engines probably won't
spider it. Google has partial support for dynamic URLs but it's
not likely to index your internal pages unless you have a good
page rank on your main page to begin with. It's is best to cast
that URL, into something like this:
http://yoursite.com/article35.html
This can be achieved by making use of the web server module
called mod-rewrite. To use this, you'll need to add a rule to
your .htaccess file using regular expressions to convert the
URL. The following 2 lines added to your .htaccess file (in
your document root) will achieve the URL conversion for the
example above.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^article([1-9][0-9]*).*
modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=$1
You need to add one RewriteRule line for each transformation
for different types of URLs. For more details on mod-rewrite,
have a look at http://powersitesystem.com/article1.html
This casting using Mod-Rewrite will convert an elegant URL into
an ugly one which CMS expects, but in the pages being returned
from your CMS, how do you convert from the ugly URL to the
elegant one?
Most CMS's come with header and footer includes which you can
append with a custom header and footer to apply to all your
pages. Assuming that you use PHP and that the HTML is the
variable $HTML, you can use PHP code in the footer (wherever we
have the entire HTML available before sending to the browser
client) to convert the ugly URLs to elegant ones.
$in = array(
"'(?<!/)modules.php\?op=modload&name=News&file=article&am
p;sid=([0-9]*)'"
); $out = array("article\\1.html");
$html = preg_replace($in, $out, $html);
The above example shows only one element in the array but we can
have as many elements as we need for our URL transformations.
This will work only if you have the entire html buffered into a
variable before sending it out. Assuming you are using PHP, An
elegant way to achieve this is to use output buffering, you can
use http://in2.php.net/manual/en/function.ob-start.php in the
header to start output buffering and
http://in2.php.net/manual/en/function.ob-get-contents.php in
the footer to get the buffered output.
The session id is usually not necessary. Even if it's critical
to the functionality of your website, it need not be in the URL.
Most users have cookies enabled so CMS can store the session id
using cookies. The web server appends the session id to the URL
the first time a visitor comes to the website just to make sure
that the application will work even in the rare case that the
user doesn't have cookies enabled, but search engines don't
accept cookies so they always get to see the session id! URL
rewriting for session maintenance can and should be turned off
within your web server settings.
Which CMS Application Do You Use And Where Do You Find Them?
For my purposes, the PostNuke Open Source Content Management
System works well. But there are many CMS applications available
that are open source and are easy to install. They all have a
loyal community base with support forums where you can get your
questions answered. To access a review of the various CMS's
available and where you can download them, please have a look
at: http://biz-whiz.com/article225.html
Note: In order to run such a system on your web site, your web
server will need to provide scripting and database support. For
a hands-free CMS setup with training to help build a search
engine friendly website see http://powersitesystem.com
Using Search Engine Friendly Themes
Your CMS system will include several templates (also called
themes) that you can use on your website, but most likely they
won't be search engine friendly. With little modification, these
can be updated to automatically optimize your pages. When you
create an article using CMS, you can specify a title, summary
and main body. You can modify the theme you and repeat the title
in H1 and ALT tags, in bold and italics, etc. You only have to
modify the template once and all the pages of your website become
automatically optimized! Now all you have to do, is to choose
an appropriate title for each article that you add and all your
pages will get automatically optimized for the keywords you use
in your title!
Site Navigation
Generally SEO's feel that having the navigation links at the
bottom or on the right side of your page allow you to position
your optimized content towards the beginning of your html page,
but users are accustomed to naturally look for a navigation menu
towards the top left of the page. If you want to go with your
visitor's intuition at the cost of placing your navigation links
at the top of your HTML code, you need to make sure that the
links are well optimized with your keywords. It might not be
obvious, but attention to the anchor text used in the navigation
links is important because these links will appear on all the
pages of your site. If you can, try to have at least one of
your important keywords in the link that leads to your main
page. i.e. Instead of using "Home" use "Your-Keywords" in the
link back to your main page; this will have a big impact on
the search engine ranking of your main page.
Topical Islands of Related Content
When you add content to your CMS, you would classify it into a
topic. A CMS like PostNuke, allows you to choose a category and
a topic for each article that you add. The CMS will automatically
create links in the chosen category page and topics page. If you
define your topics and your categories properly, you can create
a brilliant linking strategy. Since your main page links to your
topics page and since each topic page contains links to the
articles for that topic, it creates a three level sitemap for
the search engine spider to follow. Since each article will have
a link back to the main page and to the related topic, you can
establish islands of targeted topics, which the search engines
love. Without a CMS application, you would have to manually
create all the links every time you add an article, but when
you use a customized CMS application, the linking from related
topic pages happens automatically.
Conclusion
Setting up a CMS managed website that can achieve good search
engine rankings is possible if you take care of the key factors
as outlined above. For proof that a properly customized CMS
application can help you to gain top search engine rankings
see the links in the signature below.
Mufad has successfully setup a high ranking work at home
community that ranks on top for "work at home" and "home
business" at http://biz-whiz.com using CMS. He provides his
clients with a template driven website setup using a search
engine friendly CMS at http://powersitesystem.com
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