SEO friendly CMS?

David wrote:

On Tue, 19 Sep 2006 17:16:59 +0100, Jez <j.ez (AT) virgin (DOT) net> wrote:




Out of curiosity, what would you expect form a seo friendly cms?


I would expect to be able to do everything i can do with a handcoded
static site on a per page basis.

Beeing able to give every page its own title, description and keywords,
less or better no unnecessary code, no menus in javascript, no session
id's next to beeing able to play a bit with the site structure and a
bunch of other things.


I agree. All the CMS I have tried or seen have lacked really badly in
the unique title area.


I've tried a lot of CMS packages and WordPress is very good from an
SEO perspective, needs editing for SEO perfection, but that's expected
with anything that's not made by me :-) Seriously though out the box
it is very good, in fact much better than most SEO's can create by
hand!!

The WordPress templates (not the software per se) creates the titles
with the blog name within it (I assume your problem is the blog
name?). Very easy to fix within the template you use, see the title
of-

http://www.morearnings.com/2006/08/1...oogle-adsense/

The title is the same as the name of the post. Name the post with SEO
in mind and your title is optimised as well. Obviously this doesn't
work if you name your posts badly or if you want a different
title/post name.

There's a link to an SEO version of Blix on that page (the SEO version
has the shorter titles). Plan to SEO other WordPress themes.


Difficult to link pages of a different module
together other than by the index page without resorting to manual hand
written links within the text.


That's a fair point, though from an SEO point of view having
contextual links is better than menu type links.

Actually if you are looking to link related sets of pages together
(not one page at a time) there is the option of using a different page
template if posting a WordPress page (not dated/archived) rather than
a WordPress blog post (archived and dated).

With a WordPress page (make one under Write Page like the default
About page) you can choose an alternative template during creation,
you could therefore make a unique template with a set of different
links in the menu. If you have a small number of categories for
example each could have it's own additional menu template allowing for
more choice in specifying links.

This isn't for the casual WordPress user, but once setup almost anyone
would be able to do this.

I converted a clients eccomerce site to use WordPress, took a lot of
editing, but it works fine. Actually the site isn't unlike your main
site Jez (from what I recall about it) so pretty sure your site would
be convertible to WordPress allowing you to add new product pages
quite quickly in an almost WYSIWYG type system.


Wordpress does have plugins that can make
the title a bit better but not great.


What do you want the title to do?

Try this-

title><?php if (is_page("archives") || is_archive() || is_search() ||
is_home()) { ?><?php bloginfo('name'); wp_title(); ?><?php } ?><?php
if (is_single() || is_page()) { ?><?php wp_title(); ?><?php }
?></title
meta name="description" content="<?php if (is_page("archives") ||
is_archive() || is_search() || is_home()) { ?><?php bloginfo('name');
wp_title(); ?><?php } ?><?php if (is_single() || is_page()) { ?><?php
wp_title(); ?><?php } ?>" /
meta name="keywords" content="<?php if (is_page("archives") ||
is_archive() || is_search() || is_home()) { ?><?php bloginfo('name');
wp_title(); ?><?php } ?><?php if (is_single() || is_page()) { ?><?php
wp_title(); ?><?php } ?>" /

This results in the Title, and keywords and description meta tags
having the blog name for the home page and archive pages. On single
post and pages the name of the post/page is used only.

I don't worry about the meta tags since they aren't important to
Google rankings, hence just copying the title above.


I expect that someone with decent
knowledge of the workings could do lots more but I think that CMS and
SEO do not go together in any way that I like.


I'm moving most of my sites that aren't created using specific scripts
to WordPress. If I could work out automatic paging (where a large post
is automatically broken to multiple pages) I'd also move my literature
sites to WordPress as well (the multiple page thing is the only thing
stopping me).

I didn't really use a CMS prior to WordPress because of SEO reasons,
but with a little work it's as good as any site.

I'll add on a page by page basis creating a stand alone html page by
hand (nothing dynamically created), adding specific links to the menu
etc... is going to beat any CMS created page (that is assuming the
person coding the page is good at SEO) since with a hand created page
you can do almost anything. While with a CMS there are limitations
that make some things difficult (not impossible though).

What you loose by using a CMS is more than made up for by the time
saved, you can create a new page that is automatically added to
archive pages, has links from the menu/relevant pages, all added to it
in a fraction of the time it would take to do the same by hand.


Jez.


David

Some great stuff there David, thanks. I love what you are doing with the
adsense also. I use the adsense plugin Adsense Injection but it's not as
good as what you have done.

I am going to try your title code also. From what I see on your blog
it's exactly what I have been looking for. In fact I just broke from
writing this and implemented it. Works like a dream!

Dave, would you mind emailing me your clients site that you converted to
WP? I assume you would rather not post it here. The address on this post
is valid. I would like to take a look at it and see what you did.

I have been looking for a way to make the titles better in WP and have
found little information on how to get them better and no information on
how to get them right until now. Did you code yours yourself or did you
find a resource I didn't?

Best,

Jez.

David wrote:

This results in the Title, and keywords and description meta tags
having the blog name for the home page and archive pages. On single
post and pages the name of the post/page is used only.

The only thing that would make your code better IMO would be if the
archive pages archive title and the blog title were reversed, so it
would be like this:

<title>Google News &raquo; South East Plan - SE Plan</title>

as opposed to:

<title>South East Plan - SE Plan &raquo; Google News</title>

Not that I am complaining, it's considerably better for the rest of it! :-)

David

Jez.

Jez wrote:

The only thing that would make your code better IMO would be if the
archive pages archive title and the blog title were reversed, so it
would be like this:

title>Google News &raquo; South East Plan - SE Plan</title

as opposed to:

title>South East Plan - SE Plan &raquo; Google News</title

There is a WP plugin that does that for you. I believe it is
called "optimized title" or something similar.

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:07:39 +0100, Jez <j.ez (AT) virgin (DOT) net> wrote:

David wrote:
On Tue, 19 Sep 2006 17:16:59 +0100, Jez <j.ez (AT) virgin (DOT) net> wrote:
What you loose by using a CMS is more than made up for by the time
saved, you can create a new page that is automatically added to
archive pages, has links from the menu/relevant pages, all added to it
in a fraction of the time it would take to do the same by hand.


Jez.


David

Some great stuff there David, thanks. I love what you are doing with the
adsense also. I use the adsense plugin Adsense Injection but it's not as
good as what you have done.

Glad you like it, take a look at the version 2 zips like for
http://www.morearnings.com/2006/08/1...oogle-adsense/
change a few colour codes and the ads will look how you want them (I
use blended for the blogs). Also improved ad placement in the latest
version, have the first post of the archive page show a ad.

I tried a few AdSense plugins before doing the above, and wasn't happy
with them.

People are using my AdSense themes, so must have done something right
:-)

I am going to try your title code also. From what I see on your blog
it's exactly what I have been looking for. In fact I just broke from
writing this and implemented it. Works like a dream!

LOL

Dave, would you mind emailing me your clients site that you converted to
WP? I assume you would rather not post it here. The address on this post
is valid. I would like to take a look at it and see what you did.

No problem, check your email.

I have been looking for a way to make the titles better in WP and have
found little information on how to get them better and no information on
how to get them right until now. Did you code yours yourself or did you
find a resource I didn't?

A combination, the basic concept is from a theme, but I took it to
what works better for SEO. Originally I created a new header template
page and added it to the WordPress software, I then use the new header
on single post pages and the original header on archive pages. Since I
wasn't too concerned about title optimization on archive pages it
works reasonable well. With the code I posted before you can do the
same (better) with the single header template page.

Your best bet is to download a fair number of themes and look through
them for ideas, there's some very clever use of code in some of them
that lends itself to SEO.

Best,

Jez.

David
--
WordPress Themes with AdSense ads
http://www.morearnings.com/category/wordpress-themes/
AdSense Tips http://www.morearnings.com/2006/05/08/adsense-revenue/

David wrote:

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:07:39 +0100, Jez <j.ez (AT) virgin (DOT) net> wrote:

Your best bet is to download a fair number of themes and look through
them for ideas, there's some very clever use of code in some of them
that lends itself to SEO.

I just downloaded your SEO copy and will have a muck around with it. Thanks.

I will post anything else I say on the blog ;-)

David

Jez.