Search Engine Optimization

Two of the biggest problems with CMSs are:

• Duplicate content
• “One fits all” approach to creation of titles, and other page elements.

Let’s talk about duplicate content first. Search engines are all after user experience. Google measures user behavior to hundreds of a second (this is true, as one of the Google engineers said in an interview to business week -, me paraphrasing, - if we lose 1/10 of a second that’s a blink of an eye, and that’s a lot of time lost). Engineers push hard to return the most relevant results possible, as it is Google’s bread and butter. If it slips, it will lose share to a more relevant search engine, which means less clicks on ads.

As described earlier, CMS follow commands in the URL to assemble pages. Some systems also put in user IDs, which are designed to track each individual visitor. This can result in hundreds of duplications, since many different URLs point to the page with exactly the same content. For example, John and Jess get to the same page. CMS sees that they are 2 different users and assigns user tracking IDs.

http://example.com/cars/model.php?id=3&product_id=4&user1

http://example.com/cars/model.php?id=3&product_id=4&user2

URLs point to exactly the same page, yet search engines view them as different pages, because each URL is different! For large websites tracking IDs can bog the bots with duplications and result in filtering from search results. Though it is in the best interest of search engines to make sense of all the mess on non-optimized websites, it is in your interest to tackle the issue and make bots happy.

Another problem with content management systems is the “one fits all” approach to creation of pages. Most CMS pages will automatically slap a title tag on the page, not very different or exactly the same as the other pages! Title tag is perhaps the most important onpage SEO element, since it is featured as a link in search results! Imagine having thousands of duplicate title tags on the website that do not have targeted keywords! It’s a bad recipe. CMS must be configured to create unique title tags for each page, and have your unique targeted keywords. Apart from title tags, meta descriptions should be preferably different, along with varied anchor text from internal links in order to increase the range of captured keywords.