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.

What is the importance of external links to SEO

An external link is a link that points at an external domain.

• Top SEOs believe that external links are the most important source of ranking power.

• Search engines consider them as a third party vote.

• Top SEOs don’t believe that “title” link attribute is used for ranking purposes.

Many top SEOs agree that getting external links is one of the most important strategies to attaining high ranks. This comes from the idea that getting external links is one of the hardest metrics to manipulate, and therefore, one of the best ways for search engines to determine the popularity of a given webpage. This idea was first used by the search engine Alta Vista and then later improved by Google.

If you think of external links as being votes, every time someone linked to your site, it would be like receiving a vote. If you only had a few links pointing back to your site, the search engines would think that the information on your site isn’t very good, as not many people will be ‘voting’ for you. Just like receiving votes, the more you have the more you will succeed, and in this case, getting to the top of search engine rankings.

Today, the major search engines use many advanced metrics to determine the value of external links. Some of the metrics include:
• The trustworthiness of the linking domain.
• The popularity of the linking page.
• The relevancy between the source page and the target page.
• The anchor text used in the link.
• The amount of links to the same page on the source page.
• The amount of domains that link to the target page.
• The amount of variations that are used as anchor text to links to the target page.
• The ownership relationship between the source and target domains.

In addition to these metrics, external links are important for two main reasons:

1. Popularity

Whereas traffic is a “messy” metric and difficult for search engines to measure accurately, external links are both a more stable metric and easier to measure. This is because traffic numbers are stored in private server logs while external links are publicly visible and easily stored. For this reason and others, external links are a great way of determining the popularity of a web page. This metric is combined with relevancy metrics to determine the best results for a given search query.

2. Relevancy

Links provide relevancy clues that are incredibly valuable for search engines. The anchor text used in links is usually written by humans, who can interpret web pages better than computers and is usually highly reflective of the content of the page being linked to. This will be a short phrase (e.g., “Online Marketing Croydon”) or the URL of the target page (e.g., http://www.online-marketing-croydon.com).

The target and source pages and domains cited in a link also provide valuable relevancy metrics for search engines. Links tend to point to related content. This helps search engines establish knowledge hubs on the Internet that they can then use to validate the importance of a given web document.

External Recources
http://moz.com/learn/seo/external-link

Digital marketing expert Croydon

We are a digital marketing agency based in South London working with small businesses, as well as those in accountancy and the construction sector to help get them noticed online. Drop us an email at Saymoo@smart-cow.com or give us a call on 020 3137 1826.