Search Engine Optimization

Content management systems have become an essential part of the web, keeping large websites manageable, easing lives of webmasters and online retailers. CMS’s get websites online and keep them functioning in order, handling content, images, video and audio files. To date most content management systems have not been created with search engines in mind. This results in multiple problems, which can keep a website from getting the sweet spot among 10 blue links. In this series of articles I will focus on CMS optimization issues and how to fix them.

How Content Management Systems Work

If you have 10,000 products to put up for sale, you wouldn’t want to create a separate page for each, and then dig through all 10,000 listings. It is a big waste of time. This is why content management systems exist. They make management of large websites easier.

CMS uses product descriptions, pictures and other elements to build web pages. It pulls those elements from the database and creates pages for each request. Pages do not actually exist physically like HTML, but are created each time someone requests for one (a visitor, or a search engine spider). CMS system knows what type of page it needs to assemble, by the commands it receives in URL. Those commands can create big problems from SEO standpoint (something we discuss in this article).

The commands look similar to this:

http://example.com/cars/model.php?id=3&product_id=4

The “id=” and “product_id=” are requests to the content management system. Once CSM gets those requests, it returns items from the database corresponding to each ID. It wraps up database content in a template (which you have specified) and the end result is a webpage.

continued.