Search Engine Placement Tips You Should Know For CMSThere are many ways to help promote your website's search engine placement. Most search engine placement tips are general guidelines that apply to all websites, and then there are some that you need to pay special attention to if you plan on using, or are currently using, Content Management Software (CMS). The main tip for search engine placement is "keywords". If you are a site selling dog apparel, you want to think about what keywords a potential customer will type into their search engine when looking for dog apparel and plan your website keywords accordingly. Try to use at least two words for every "keyword phrase" you plan to use. Also, give different pages different keywords. One page might be "dog apparel" while another may refer specifically to "large dog sweaters" or "Velcro dog boots". Search engines pay very close attention to a web page's title, so it is VERY important that you have your keywords in your page titles. Each title should be short and to the point containing the keywords specific to that page. Content Management Software does not always allow a user to specify the text in the page title, so you will want to check the software to make sure you have the ability to manually control page titles. The content of your page is another hot spot for search engine placement. Websites with the keywords in the first sentence and first paragraph of the content place much higher than websites without keywords right at the beginning of the content. The rest of your page content should reflect the keywords for that specific page, as well. Do not use graphics to display important text because search engines do not read the text in a graphic. Only text contained in an images ALT attribute is crawled by search engines. Make sure your Content Management Software allows for ALT attributes in image tags. Another search engine placement tip that pertains specifically to Content Management Software is "search engine friendly URLs". Many CMS will create URLs that contain symbols such as "?" or "%". Search engines often cut off all text after the symbol, possibly eliminating important keywords. Check to see if your CMS creates search engine friendly URLs. If it does not, check to see if there is a module, plug-in or add-on that will accomplish this task. It is extremely important to have a Sitemap link on the bottom of your web pages. This link should go to a page that contains simple HTML links to all of the important pages on your website. Content Management Systems can often times create search engine friendly sitemap pages automatically. Make sure the anchor text on your link is relevant and contains keywords where possible. These are simply a few of the search engine placement tips that will help make your website optimized for search engines and increase your search engine ranking. Check that your Content Management Software is capable of applying these search engine placement tips to maximize the success of your website. |