What good to a search-engine-optimization professional is a site full of unique content with no way to optimize it? Not much, unless that professional enjoys nagging web developers to make minor edits. A strong content management system enables marketing teams and SEO professionals to work more independently of developers, reducing friction and increasing efficiency for both teams.
I’ve worked with a lot of different content management systems over the years. None has been ideal for SEO. If you’re in the position to build or buy a CMS, consider this checklist of SEO capabilities. Some of these transcend the page-editing functions of a typical web CMS. But since it’s my "SEO CMS Wishlist," I’m including them. All of the features below share a common goal: Enable the SEO professional to act independently of developers on content that impacts search engines.
Individual URLs
Every URL is an individual page, period. A CMS must key off of a URL — not a title tag — and it needs to enable the editing of every URL independently. For example, these three URLs are versions of the same content and may look nearly identical. But they are individual pages to search engines and need individual optimization.
- www.jillsfakecompany.com/stuff.html
- www.jillsfakecompany.com/stuff.html?page=2
- www.jillsfakecompany.com/stuff.html?filter=red
If a URL cannot be edited individually, the CMS will merely enforce duplicate content on the site and require the SEO team to pester the developers with distracting chore-like edits.
Manual Optimization
The ability to manually edit certain elements of an individual page is a basic capability for a web CMS. At the least, the SEO should be able to edit the title tag, meta description, and any content and cross-linking fields on the page. Meta keywords should be editable also, though primarily to remove any previous stuffing or to impact internal site search, since meta keywords no longer influence major search engines' rankings.
Formulaic Optimization
The formulas that populate default title tags and meta descriptions should also be editable by page type and category. For example, if the title tag for product pages is structured as “Jill’s Fake Company: Product Name,” the SEO will more than likely need to switch that around to read something like this “Product Name: Category from Jill’s Fake Company.” The formula will be different depending on the page type. A subcategory page wouldn’t have a “product name” element to display in the title tag.
In some cases, specific categories or subcategories may need slightly different syntax to improve readability in search results. Consider the following examples where the formula “Subcategory Name Category Name | Shoes & Boots from Jill’s Fake Company” results in acceptable or odd phrasing in different categories:
- High Heeled Women’s Shoes | Shoes & Boots from Jill’s Fake Company
- Rain Boots Women’s Shoes | Shoes & Boots from Jill’s Fake Company
Generated from the same formula, “Rain Boots Women’s Shoes” reads awkwardly while “High Heeled Women’s Shoes” reads very well. The same formulaic awkwardness will typically trickle down to the meta description as well, resulting in a doubly awkward impression when the page is displayed in search results.
Batch Optimization
Just as pages need to be edited individually, there are also times when they need to be edited as a batch. Especially if the CMS can’t handle optimization of the formulas that populate default title tags and other simple elements, batch editing is a critical time saver. In this scenario, the SEO professional downloads a .csv file of all the editable elements of every page in a category or subcategory. The SEO can then edit at will in Excel, enabling all sorts of concatenating, searching and replacing, and other formulaic edits far more quickly than copying and pasting into individual data fields on individual pages. Once the data has been optimized, the .csv is uploaded in the same format with the same columns as the download file, and the data replaces what was previously stored in the CMS for those pages.
Page Creation
Sometimes an SEO professional needs to create a page of content — such as an HTML sitemap or a specific frequently-asked-questions page — to address questions identified in keyword research. Ideally the CMS would include a simple WYSIWYG editor to enable light HTML editing such as link insertion, bold, and underline. Many SEOs will know how to make a link, but may not know the intricacies of CSS and JavaScript. The content needs to be populated in a CSS and JavaScript safe zone in the template to ensure that it’s formatted as regular heading and paragraph text in the same style as the rest of the site. Making this feature simple to use will ensure fewer emergencies in the future from users who need help immediately negating this style or that function.
Display Names
Category names are often tied not just to navigation text on the web, but backend systems, fulfillment, print catalogue conventions, and other business taxonomies that are deeply engrained. When the category’s name can’t be changed, the CMS needs to have a separate field to drive the display name for the site. For example, if a yellow pages (directory) site has a category called “Bark and Bark Products” that regular users will be looking for under “Mulch,” the CMS needs to couple the unchangeable category name of “Bark and Bark Products” with the search-engine friendly — and, user friendly —“Mulch” for display on the site in navigation, title tags, headings, and meta data.
Page-Level Server Header Edits
Several of the most commonly used redirect and suppression tools are simple to automate and have little or no impact on the core functionality of the site. Including these options in the CMS for each individual URL removes the distraction of one-off requests.
- Server header status: 301, 302, 404
- Rel=canonical
- Meta robots noindex, nofollow
Server-Level Edits
Similarly, several files at the root impact only SEO. Enabling the SEO team to post and edit these pages through the CMS or another tool offloads these chores from the developer team.
XML Sitemap: Ideally the XML sitemap would autogenerate and post nightly. The tool would accept a list of disallows or negatives similar to the way robots.txt is formatted, effectively blocking certain categories of URLs from inclusion in the XML sitemap.
Robots.txt: Ideally the tool would allow the SEO to create, edit and test the robots.txt file, similar to the way Google Webmaster Tools handles this feature.
Webmaster Tool Verification: Google and Bing allow verification of a user for a site by posting a specific text file to the root or inserting a specific meta tag on the homepage. Rather than requiring these requests to route through web developers, choose the preferred verification method and add it as a function in the CMS.
Summary
This wishlist of SEO CMS functions assumes the appropriate level of training and expertise required to use it. For example, I once had root drive access to the Intel.com web server. But I had the training and experience — as an Intel employee —to know how to use it and, more importantly, how not to use it. Similarly, some server-level edits like robots.txt should only be handled by an SEO professional or web developer, since those edits can accidentally disallow the entire site. Consider setting up a specific user group with access to SEO features.
This SEO CMS wishlist focuses primarily on page-level edits, but the taxonomy or category-level features of a CMS are equally important to SEO. In my next article, I’ll share my SEO CMS dreams of taxonomy-management features. In the meantime, share your CMS dreams in the comments, below.
