1. The Trouble With Content Management Systems is... Stephan Spencer & Eric Enge Co-Authors of The Art of SEO

2. 2 © 2009 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com Who Am I? Co-author of The Art of SEO Founded Netconcepts LLC in Madison WI in 1995. Sold it to Covario in 2010. Founded Netconcepts Ltd in Auckland in 1999. Lived in New Zealand for 8 yrs, returned to US in 2007. Invented GravityStream, a pay-for-performance SEO technology (now Covario’s Organic Search Optimizer)

3. 3 © 2009 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts www.netconcepts.com sspencer@netconcepts.com And, Who Am I? Co-author of The Art of SEO President of Stone Temple Consulting – 19 person SEO and PPC firm Founder of Multiple Web Site Publishing Companies – Publish web sites, grow them, then sell them – 2 significant exits so far

4. Open Source or Closed Source? Open Source platforms – WordPress – Drupal – B2evolution – Joomla – Mambo – PHPNuke, Postnuke, etc. –...and many others. Bigger list (and fully functioning demos of all)at www.opensourcecms.com. Also look at www.cmsmatrix.org www.opensourcecms.comwww.cmsmatrix.org

5. Closed Source Platforms ColdFusion IBM Lotus Web Content Mangement OpenText (formerly Vignette) PixelSilk SharePoint Server Sitecore Sitefinity And many, many others!

6. Critical CMS Features Title tag customization and rules – Can you revise the formulas used to generate the title tags? Static, keyword-rich URLs – With manual override? Meta tag customization – Custom meta descriptions and meta robots tags? Enabling custom HTML tags – NoFollow on links, tags for headlines and subheadlines etc. Internal anchor text flexibility – Rather than simply making all links in a site’s architecture the page’s title, customize the anchor text of category-level or global navigation links Intelligent categorization structure – Customizable navigation panels

7. Critical CMS Features Pagination controls – Control it through inclusion of more items per page, more contextually relevant anchor text (e.g., not “next,” “prev,” and page numbers), and careful use of NoFollow and meta NoIndex tags 301-redirect functionality – for expired content, for pages that have a newer version, and for dodging keyword cannibalization issues XML/RSS pinging – quick, accurate pinging of the major feed services Image-handling and alt attributes – Alt attributes serve as the “anchor text” when an image is used as a link URLs free of tracking parameters and session IDs – Just say “No” to incomplete indexation and duplicate content!

8. Critical CMS Features Customizable URL structure – Don’t want /archives/ in the URLs of all your archived articles? Want the article name instead of the article’s database ID in the URL? 301 redirects to a canonical URL – Automatic handling is a must Static-looking URLs – The most palatable URLs to spiders are the ones that look like they lead to static pages— no query strings in the URL Keywords in URLs – can help your rankings RSS feeds – The CMS should auto-create RSS feeds to help your site rank in Google Blog Search and other feed engines

9. Desirable CMS Features CSS exceptions – modify how a strong headline or list element appears visually Static caching options – Receiving a high level of traffic from social media portals or news sites? Tagging and tag clouds – This Web 2.0 feature can help with SEO, thanks in large part to the keyword-rich text links Keyword-rich intro copy on category-level pages – helps set a stable keyword theme for the page Customizable anchor text on navigational links – “Contact,” “About Us,” “Read More,” “Full Article,” and so on make for lousy anchor text

10. Desirable CMS Features Multilevel categorization structure – For nesting subcategories into categories, sub-subcategories into subcategories, etc. Paraphrasable excerpts – Avoid having the same content displayed on Permalink pages, category pages, archives-by-date pages, tag pages, and the home page Breadcrumb navigation – Reinforces your internal hierarchical linking structure with keyword- rich text links Meta NoIndex tags for low-value pages – Even if you use NoFollow attributes in links to these pages, other people may still link to them, which carries a risk of ranking those pages above some of your more valuable content

11. Desirable CMS Features NoFollow links in comments – Allow it and your site will be a spam magnet XML Sitemap generator – Save yourself a lot of hassle, as opposed to trying to generate one with a third-party tool XHTML validation – Automatically check for malformed HTML, as search engines may end up seeing a page differently from how it renders on the screen and accidentally consider navigation to be part of the content or vice versa Pingbacks, trackbacks, comments, and antispam mechanisms – Comments/trackbacks/pingbacks are vectors for spam. Defend against this with Akismet, Mollom, Defensio, or similar.

12. Opensourcecms.com

13. CMSmatrix.org

14. Clean URLs - Drupal

15. Clean URLs Joomla

16. Clean URLs – Joomla (Step 2)

17. URL Settings - Wordpress

18. Title Tags Drupal

19. Metadata Drupal

20. Titles and Metadata Joomla

21. Joomla Metadata

22. Wordpress Metadata

23. Duplicate Content Mitigation Dup content is rampant on CMSes Set the canonical version using the “canonical” tag Or selectively append tracking codes for humans w/ “white hat cloaking” Or use JavaScript to append the codes – REI.com used to append a "vcat" parameter on all brand links on their Shop By Brand page (see http://web.archive.org/web/20060823085548/www.rei.c om/rei/sales_and_events/brands.html) 23

24. Duplicate Content Mitigation Herd bots to permalink URL & lead in everywhere else (Archives by Date pages, Category pages, Tag pages, Home page, etc.) – Not just the first couple paragraphs e.g. not the tag! – WordPress fix: revise your Main Index Template theme file to display paraphrased “Optional Excerpt”: if (empty($post->post_excerpt) || is_single() || is_page()) { the_content(); } else { the_excerpt(); echo " Continue reading » "; } 24

25. Duplicate Content Mitigation Include sig line (& headshot photo!) at bottom of post/article. Link to original article/post permalink URL! – http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2008/06 /03/syndicating-your-articles/ – http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/2008/05/bra nd-yourself-with-photo-sig-line 25

26. Intro Copy for Stable Keyword Focus Category pages, tag pages typically don’t have a stable keyword theme because they simply contain the latest content in reverse chronological order Add intro copy to stabilize the keyword focus “Sticky” posts – Always appear at the top of the page – A way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page – e.g. WordPress “WP-Sticky” plugin

27. Sticky post 27

28. Rejig Internal Linking Structure Tag clouds & tag pages & tag conjunction pages? – Not as useful for SEO as it used to be – e.g. “UTW Theme Compatibility Thing” WordPress plugin) – Auto-tagging: like what Compendium is doing (see screenshot) Related Posts – e.g. “Yet Another Related Posts” WordPress plugin Top 10 posts – e.g. “Popularity Contest” WordPress plugin Next & Previous / pagination – e.g. “WP-PageNavi” WordPress plugin 28

29. Compendium Blogware’s interface for creating “compended” blogs (i.e. auto-tagging) 29

30. Pagination Excessive pagination dilutes “crawl equity”, causing numerous pages of product listings to not get crawled. Reduce # of pages in pagination system to improve crawlability & indexation Next/Previous vs. page number list vs. Show All Consider disallowing “View All” links and forcing spiders through subcat pages (the keyword-rich path). Display as many products per page as possible (max 120) within 150K file size. Fewer items/products per subcat = fewer pagination pages to crawl at subcat level for max indexation 1-3 pages pagination = useful for sending different keyword signals? 30

31. Categorization Recruit a taxonomy specialist Follow web standards in naming conventions – Readily understandable by most web users. E.g. ”About us” Match up with keyword research Legacy names / industry buzzwords as category names not always ideal – E.g. kitchen electrics vs kitchen small appliances – E.g. bespoke vs tailored Goes into anchor! Also the title, H1, copy on the page, URL… 31

32. Tagging Great for deep internal linking, interlinking Generates keyword-rich links Display tag clouds of most popular tags Link to "related tags” Allow visitors to tag your stuff? (ie. “folksonomies”) – Customers use their own terminology / vocabulary Mine your own weblogs to look for most frequently searched keywords and use those as tags Also tag externally: reddit, delicious, digg, Technorati 32

33. Internal Search Results Pages Is it indexable content? Only if engines can find it through links. Caution: Google’s new webmaster guideline 33

34. Faceted Navigation Faceted navigation, a.k.a. guided navigation, provides clickable product inventory breakdowns, by brand, color, price range, etc. By doing so it creates into a huge number of permutations for the spiders to follow. Problem exacerbated with clickable, resortable column headings Nofollow all links leading to low (SEO) value facets, e.g. facets that do price range breakdown, re-sorting and re-pagination, or simple filtering Or collapse near-dup facets (canonical tags or revise link URLs) Optimize URLs, title tags, etc. of high-value facets in an automated, scalable fashion (e.g. Organic Search Optimizer) 34

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36. Manufacturer-Supplied Content Distance yourself from the “thin affiliates”. Augment with substantial amount of unique, valuable content – Customer reviews – BUT third party services use JavaScript! – Not “mashups” with Wikipedia, Twitter, & the usual suspects (see screenshot) "Uniquify" content. Not sufficient to shuffle the page's content around! Think about overlapping “shingles” – Scaling? Mechanical Turk, yes. Markov chains, no. – Other options: HumanRewriter.com, Textbroker.com A nail in the coffin: same titles & meta descriptions 36

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38. Content in JavaScript Third-party hosted customer reviews solutions like BazaarVoice & PowerReviews based on JavaScript Execute the JavaScript and pull out the User Generated Content (UGC) Incorporate the UGC back into the page that gets discovered by spiders – Using Noscript? Not ideal. – Proxy server based approach, e.g. Covario’s Organic Search Optimizer 38

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40. PageRank Sculpting Your CMS My preference is to not flow PageRank... – On external links in trackbacks, comments (by default on most platforms) – Where the link is commercial in nature and would be reciprocal – On links to date-based archives, assuming you have category and tag hierarchy (noindexing/disallowing is not enough!) Options: iFrames, Noindex, JavaScript, Nofollow ( ), personalization, cookie detection, CSS detection, Flash detection 40

41. Now What? What can you do tomorrow that will improve your site’s SEO? Write down 3 things. Get ‘em done! Then, come up with some ideas that you can work on next week! Remember: you eat an elephant one bite at a time

42. Contact us! Eric Enge eenge@stonetemple.com @stonetemple (508) 485-7751 www.stonetemple.com For a One Sheet SEO Checklist, email me, or drop off a business card Stephan Spencer stephan@stephanspencer.com @sspencer (608) 209-2595 www.artofseobook.com For an SEO Best & Worst Practices whitepaper & checklist, e-mail me, or drop off a business card