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SEO Basics: Tips for a Proprietary CMS

July 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

There are often cases where a business will choose to develop a custom content management system (CMS) rather than buying something off the shelf. I have some first hand experience building my own content management system and can testify that if it’s implemented corrrectly it will rank as well as any commercial CMS powered website. The key to a developing a good CMS is to first understand the purpose of your website (requirements) and secondly to design the framework (database, business logic, GUI) to support it. There are also some fundamental SEO related guidelines you should build into your proprietary CMS if you hope to rank well in the search engines.
  • Unique Meta Tags: Each page on your website should allow for unique meta tags. This will keep your site away from any supplemental index issues and allow you to rank for a broader range of keywords.
  • URL Rewriter: Stay away from dynamic URLs/querystring variables to load content, static URLs are the only way to go. Keywords in the URL are an important ranking factor so make sure to use relevant kewyords in your static URLs. Creating static URLs often requires parsing your URL for keywords so that you can query your database for the correct content.
  • Links: To help search spiders easily crawl throughout the site, add the ability to have unique links within the body content and footer. Implementing a strategy such as bread crumb navigation (with keyword rich anchor text) is both useful for crawlability and search engine rankings.
  • Content/Keyword Insertion: Not only should your content be unique for each page, you should also allow for your CMS to dynamically insert relevant keywords into your content for image alt tags, links, page copy, and meta tags.
Filed Under: CMS, SEO

Google Learning to Index Flash Content

July 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Yesterday the Google Webmaster Central Blog reported that Google is working to integrate Adobe’s flash player technology in order to better index flash files into it’s algorithms. This is a very interesting development because over the years organic search experts have shied away from recommending flash within websites, but if Google is now indexing text within flash files, site owners can concentrate even more on user experience rather than just SEO. Below is some very useful Q&A taken from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:
Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?

We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.
Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:
  1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
  2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
  3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
Filed Under: SEO