Can't Your CMS and Search Engines All Just Get Along?
If you've been around the Web for any length of time, you've heard of SEO—or, if you're not familiar with the acronym, Search Engine Optimization. It's the process of making sure you're your Web pages rank at or near the top when people do a search in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com, or whatever search engine they use.
Over the past few years, as SEO has become big business and CMS products commonplace, a concern has arisen that a CMS can hinder getting high scores in search engine rankings. And these rumors of poorly behaved CMS products fouling up your SEO, sadly, were true. What many people don't know, however, is that over time both CMS products and search engines have grown up and they get along much better these days without needing anywhere near as much “supervision.” When you look at URLs, for example, often for any kind of page that is fully or partially generated “on the fly,” you'll see parameters—basically non-English strings (&var=value) of text with question marks, ampersands and numbers, that only mean something to the system reading them. Content management systems are masters at generating these undecipherable URLs. Problem was, for a long time, the search engines weren't great at reading them. When search engines relied heavily on URLs with few to no parameters, this was a big problem. But now that search technologies focus more on the content on the page and linking, the unruly URL is much less of a barrier than it used to be. Yes, it's nice to provide user-friendly URLs, but it's no longer a show-stopper for search rankings and indexing. Another behavioral problem had to do with tags. For those of you who learned HTML “from scratch”, you know what these are. They are HTML tags put at the top of each page that provide metadata—information that says what the page is about, including the description and keywords. They don't show up in your Web browser, but search engines can see them. In the old days, immature CMS products, while they may have been easy to use for entering content, didn't always give users a place to specify meta information for each page. Thus, search engines, some of which used meta tags as their primary indexing mechanism, would see every page of the site as the same page. Consequently, your pages were virtually invisible to the search engines. Nowadays, most CMS products provide easy interfaces for SEO and prompt users to enter titles, descriptions, keywords and even allow you to write your own URLs. Problem solved. Search engines still look at URLs and meta tags, but, as they have gotten more sophisticated, rely on them much less, and more on the actual content-- the words actually on the page. So the issue of your CMS circumventing your desire to play nicely with search engines is much less bothersome. Now, rather than your tech team focusing on the mechanics of SEO or mod_rewrite within your CMS, your writers can focus on the art of SEO, which is in the content itself.
