Using a Content Management System for Search Engine Positioning - Themes, Navigation, and Related Content
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Using Search Engine Friendly Themes
Your CMS system will come inbuilt with several templates (also called themes) that you can choose to use on your website, but most likely they will not be search engine friendly. With a little modification, these can be updated in such a way as to automatically optimize your pages. When you create an article in the CMS, you specify a title, summary, and main body. You can modify the theme you are going to use to repeat the title in H1 tags, in alt tags, in bold and italics… you know the SEO drill. 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 your pages will get automatically optimized for the keywords you use in your title!
Site Navigation
Generally, SEOs feel that having the navigation links at the bottom or on the right side of your page allows 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 visitors intuition at the cost of placing your navigation links at the top of your html code, you will need to make sure that the links are well optimized with your keywords. It may not be obvious, but attention to the anchor text used in the navigation links is very important because these links will appear on all 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, 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 need to classify it. Some CMSs, like PostNuke, allow you to choose a category and a topic for each article that you add. The CMS will automatically create the links for you in the chosen category page and the chosen 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 each topic page contains links to the articles for that topic, it creates a three level sitemap for the searchengine 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, the search engines love such a setup. Without a CMS application, you would have to create all the links yourself each time you add an article, but when you use a properly setup CMS application, it all happens automatically.
Conclusion
Setting up a CMS managed website that can achieve a good search engine ranking is possible if you take care of the key factors outlined in this article. Now, in addition to the powerful features, ease of creation and maintenance of your website, you have one more reason to use a CMS. I have disproved the myth that CMS websites do not rank well with the search engines. On the contrary, I have shown how a CMS application if setup correctly, can help you to gain top rankings.
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