| Top Search Engine Ranking Using Content Management Systems |
Copyright © 2004, Mufad
Power Site System
http://powersitesystem.com
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.
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. CMS allows you to easily manage multiple pages on
your site, categorized into appropriate topics and categories.
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. 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
For more details on mod-rewrite, have a look at
http://powersitesystem.com/article1.html
The session id is usually not necessary in the URL. Most users
have cookies enabled so CMS can store the session id using
cookies. URL rewriting for session maintenance can and should
be turned off in your web server settings.
Which CMS Application Do You Use?
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. To access a review
of the various CMS's available see
http://biz-whiz.com/article225.html - For a hands-free CMS setup
with training to help build a search engine friendly website see
http://powersitesystem.com
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. Attention to the anchor text
used in the navigation links is important because these links
will appear on all the pages of your site.
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.
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.
Resource Box:
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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
This article May be Reproduced provided the signature is
included and links are left intact.
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