Since November 2003, the good folk at Google have found themselves on a public relations roller coaster. As the biggest and most popular search tool ever, one would think that Google had nothing to prove. Realistically though, the Internet is a participatory medium built on the experiences of live-users as well as a business medium build upon the bottom line. Two important facts about the Internet:
1/ Aside from paid-entry content and personal ISP costs, use of the Internet is for the most part free, and, 2/ it can be extremely expensive to run a large website.
As the world's greatest search appliance, the vast majority of Google visitors, the Searchers, use the site for free. As far as this group is concerned, if they can find the information they are looking for quickly and easily, Google has performed well. If not, there are always three or four other search tools they can use but their initial preference tends to default to Google. There is another group of Google users that are often overlooked in the mainstream media and in the business press, the Advertisers. In most respects, both groups want the same thing from Google, albeit for different reasons. In other, less obvious respects however, the needs and wants of these two groups directly contradict each other. Add to this mixture a third group of Google users, the Investors. This group may be much smaller than the other two groups however their influence, at times, seems to be greater than the first two.
Advertisers want a search engine that gives them as many options as possible for the smallest investment possible. With the growth of the search engine optimization sector, online advertisers have access to technicians who make their websites as search-friendly as possible in the bid to achieve first page rankings. Now that both Google and Overture have fine-tuned their paid-advertising offerings through AdWords and Content Match, many smaller search tools such as Lycos are jumping on the paid-placement/contextual distribution model. This makes a strong environment for advertisers but also serves to drive advertising costs up quickly. Paid-search listings have created an odd situation for search engine users though in that the majority of users will implicitly trust organic (non-paid) results before trusting paid-results. Nevertheless, paid-search and contextual distribution is likely the way of the future.
The third group, Investors, has vastly different wants and needs from Google. They want a return on their investments and, like most investors, they will want a regular and relatively unchallenged return on their investment. I believe this group is driving a lot of decisions at Google over the past few months and will be driving decisions for several quarters to come. Due in part to their willingness to invest however, Google has become one of the most written about companies in the world.
Google has been receiving a great deal of press recently, most of it tied to the coming IPO. While this has increased the already high level of scrutiny Google faces from the webmaster community, much of it has been negative, finally reflecting a growing discontent among webmasters that has been brewing for almost a year. When looking at the "big picture", it seems obvious that a lot of the dissent targeted at Google is, in reality, anger over the often bitterly hard rules of business. Much of the environment driving thinking and decision making at the Googleplex over the past year stems from elements that are entirely out of Google's control. Google did not create the crash of 2000 but decisions made around Google are directly effected by the crash. While Google may be somewhat responsible for Microsoft's sudden interest in search technologies, it is the success of Google that has caught the attention of the great-eye of Redmond. Google did not even create the conditions for the ultimate monetization of search but it is forced to live with and evolve within a situation that started years before Larry and Sergey entered Stanford University.
Recent History To look at the recent history of Google, we need to look back four years to the Dot-Bomb crash. Before the floor fell out of the market, money was flowing in every conceivable way including into the search market. Back then, Excite teamed up with broadband access provider @Home and AOL purchased the media giant Time Warner. Yahoo was, at that time, the certified king of search tools but there were literally dozens of other search tools, any one of which could have captured the market share Google enjoyed at its height last year. Back then, Google was a very small concern that was growing rapidly through an unorganized, grassroots word of mouth promotion. When the market crashed, most of the larger players in the search world were hurt badly, and in some cases absolutely destroyed. As Google was so small then, they survived relatively unscathed and emerged from the 18-month downturn stronger than their competition, and in many ways, wiser. The four years following the Dot-Bomb crash has emerged as one of the most interesting periods in business history with mergers, acquisitions and the development of a new business model based on making actual money by providing quantifiable services. This is the point where Overture (then known as GoTo.Com) entered the market and the monetization of search began. Overture (GoTo) entered the market with a simple but revolutionary business strategy based on treating business listings as advertisers as opposed to thinking of them as content providers. The revenue generator for Overture (GoTo) was the auctioning of placements based on bids for keyword phrases. The higher your bid, the higher your placements. The most powerful feature of Overture's (GoTo) business model was in the distribution of paid-search results to some of the largest players in the industry, including Yahoo and MSN. From that point on, search suddenly had quantifiable monetary values attached to it. Before the auction format was introduced, search engine businesses based their revenues heavily on delivering banner advertising along with search results. Within months, Google was working on its major revenue generator, AdWords.
Significant Challenges 2003 marked the next great watershed year in the business of search. Yahoo, Google and MSN went on buying sprees, snatching up as many innovators, competitors, and more importantly, as many patents as they possibly could. Yahoo even purchased the original search moneymaker, Overture. Last year was the year that the business of search became a mainstream concern and also the year that the industry matured from providing listings to becoming an advertising medium. There is a lot of money to be made helping people find information on the Internet and the big three spent the past 18-months preparing to fight for the lion's share of the market. As the most popular information tool of all time, Google is thought to be the front-runner but Yahoo's growing market numbers and MSN's anticipated introduction of its own algorithmic search tool pose significant challenges to Google's current dominance. Ask Jeeves and Lycos also pose lesser but still very real challenges to Google in the long run.
Google's New Business Model Google has a new business model that seems to stray away from their original intent of building the best information retrieval system ever. With the upswing in Internet marketing, Google is clearly focused on delivering contextual based advertising through the AdWords program. This model has expanded in the past year to cover images and larger ads, including what were once described as banner ads. While they continue to support algorithmic search and continue to offer free-placement (or organic) listings, the real revenue generator is paid-search traffic through AdWords. This has been seen by many in the SEO industry as a betrayal of Google's original intent however, it appears to me to be a realistic plan for survival in the coming years. Like Microsoft before it, Google sees profitable revenue streams and is aggressively perusing them. As Internet advertising has become a popular tool for corporate marketing departments, covering as many bases in the field simply makes sense for Google. That is why Google risks alienating traditional banner advertising companies by offering banners at very low cost via AdWords. Having one of the largest online distribution networks though AdSense and soon through GMail makes Google's advertising offerings the most attractive paid-listing services. MSN and Yahoo will most certainly strive to compete but, even with Yahoo's control of Overture, both remain fairly far behind Google.
The Future of Google Google seems to be following the same path Microsoft did in the late 80's and early 90's. (Sorry folks but I think it's true). While not as overtly aggressive as Microsoft, Google is slowly knocking off or buying competitors and innovators who can challenge their markets. Google is not large enough to scare MSN or even Yahoo but they are obviously trying to lock-down loose ends and prevent others from entering an arena already overpopulated with Yahoo/Overture, Lycos and MSN. The future of Google is in paid advertising. It would be folly to predict an end to organic listings as these are the greatest lossleader ever devised but, in reality, FREE is a four-letter "F" word in the minds of many investors. AdWords, on the other hand is a program that makes a lot of money. Google is also about to face its stiffest competition yet as MSN is almost ready to enter the market with its own algorithmic search engine. Having sat on the sidelines for the past seven years, the engineers at Microsoft have learned a great deal about what works and what does not work in the business of search. Google users should expect the introduction of several new features such as the recent introduction of GMail, to try to dominate in localized searches, and to make attempts at personalization of search results. We should also expect an expanded set of toolbars and desktop search applications as Google readies itself for Microsoft's new search-focused operating system Longhorn, scheduled to be released in early 2006.
Webmasters, SEOs and other search industry players should not let up on Google as the client is always the best critic of any business but I have decided to try to take a more philosophical look at the business of search. Like many older characters in this industry, I am somewhat concerned with directions the business end of the business is taking us, but like any intelligent species, I think evolution should trump emotion. The Internet is changing rapidly as it increasingly becomes an essential tool in everyday life and the industry around Internet marketing is changing almost as rapidly. I can't really blame Google for taking a proactive evolutionary stance but, having helped dozens survive the Florida surprise just before Christmas last year, I do hope their timing is kinder in the future.
A study of search engines and search engine user habits found that in almost every instance, the results found at each of the five search engines studied were relativity similar to each other. The study was recently conducted by San Mateo market research firm Vividence and consisted of searches conducted by general search users on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos and Ask Jeeves. Asked to find the answers to a series of questions designed to show how each engine performed and which engine produced the greatest user satisfaction, participants found the correct answer on one engine as frequently as they did on the others.
On the performance test, each engine fared equally well. On the user satisfaction test however, Google emerged as the clear winner with an overall customer satisfaction rating of 68% compared to 59 percent for Yahoo, 56 percent for Ask Jeeves, 53 percent for MSN and 48 percent for Lycos. According to the study, Google ranked high in user satisfaction for three main reasons, its strong brand name, the site's uncluttered appearance, and the fact that paid advertising is clearly marked.
On Monday, AOL announced plans to increase its subscriber list by targeting US broadband users in its first massive advertising campaign of the year. Beginning on June 1, visitors to the NYTimes website, Washingtonpost.Com, RollingStone.Com and other multimedia sites can expect to see advertisements touting AOL's Sports Channels, Homework Helper, Parental Controls, and access to Time Warner content exclusive to AOL. "The campaign is designed to persuade prospective members that a broadband connection alone is not enough," said John Lane, vice president of online marketing. AOL is looking to attract new users to grow the current 4-million broadband AOL subscribers list by the beginning of the third quarter. AOL boasted 3-million broadband users as of December 2003.
Promoting a website can entail multiple forms of marketing from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) to banner ads to search engine placement. While this is often a great way to go as it helps safeguard your business from fluctuations in any one area, it does lead to additional issues. A main consideration with these multiple facetted promotions is determining exactly which are producing a good ROI and which ones are just costing money with little or no value returned.
And that's where your statistics come in. In a conversation with Rick Morris of WeDoHosting.com he noted that less than 10% of their hosting clients access their stats regularly. If you are using your site for any kind on business purpose your statistics are extremely important. Without them you have no idea what benefit you are getting from your and your promotions.
Take for example a website being promoted through a combination of SEO, banner advertising, PPC and paid links. If this site were getting 500 unique visitors a day based on these promotions one might consider it a success. What one now has to determine is which promotions are paying for themselves, and which are not. Most PPC engines will have some form of statistics provided to let the user know which terms are being clicked and how many times, but what about the others? Only through checking your site statistics to find out where your visitors are coming from can you determine whether your other promotions are working out. If you are paying $200/mth for a banner ad on a site and, though checking your stats discover that you are only getting 10 visitors per month from this promotion, regardless of whether you are making money overall, this promotion is probably not worth the money invested. If you spend $100/mth on a text link and discover that no one actually clicks on it you'll have to take a good look at whether this investment is worth it (though SEO must be taken into account with paid links as is noted in a previous article which can be found at http://news.stepforth.com/2004-news/Mar31-04.html).
To be thorough, it is only proper to note that I am mentioning only a small portion of the vast information available in your statistics. You can view which search engines are sending traffic, which search phrases the traffic is coming from, what are your main entry pages and which ones do people leave from (leaving you now with the task of determining why).
But as powerful as your statistics may be there are additional features that are not available through most general stats. If, for example, you want to know what percentage of people that came from Overture went to your order page - this is not available.
If you would like to know how many people that searched a specific phrase in Google went to your contact page - this is unavailable.
Those 10 visitors you got from the banner ad campaign? While outwardly not great, if you discover that all 10 went to your order page then it just might be worth keeping this promotion.
And then there is ClickTracks. ClickTracks is a stats program of a different kind. I couldn't possibly get into everything it does save to say that we were so impressed that we got it for ourselves and have posted information on it on our website at http://stats.stepforth.com.
So at the very least, log in and familiarize yourself with the statistics your web hosting provider supplies you with (if you're not sure how your host should be able to point you in the right direction). If done regularly it should only take a few minutes each day to get a snapshot of your site traffic and visitors. This may very well be the best few minutes you spend on your site and the catalyst for future development.
In a dramatic election year about-face, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson recently stated he would recommend President Bush endorse a congressional bill making the importation of Canadian pharmaceuticals legal. Due to many factors, including public sponsorship of Medicare, Canadian drug prices average 44% to 78% lower than American prices for the exact same medicines. While the shift in the U.S. administration's attitude is good for American consumers and Canadian online pharmacies, it could have a surprising effect on stocks of drugs north of the boarder. According to today's Globe and Mail, "A recent study at the University of Texas at Austin found that if all U.S. residents bought their prescription drugs north of the border, Canada's drug supply would be exhausted in 38 days."
The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
StepForth, (working quietly behind the scenes) is proud to be a part of the team that is introducing the world's first accessible search engine for people with disabilities, YouSearched.Com. The search tool was developed by UK based philanthropist and entrepreneur Khalid Karrar, with technical assistance provided by StepForth CEO, Ross Dunn.
Developing an accessible search engine means ensuring that anyone using screen readers or refreshable braille devices will be able to fully operate YouSearched.Com, as will disabled users who do not use pointing devices. The introduction of an accessible search engine opens the Internet to a growing segment of our society whose use of the web has been generally limited by non-accessible search tools. YouSearched.Com also benefits Internet users with older computers and those in developing countries who tend to use text-only browsers in a bid to save bandwidth costs.
YouSearched.Com is both a search engine and a directory with topic categories ranging from Art to Travel & Transport listed below the keyword text-box. Each directory category has a large 150x150 pastel icon above 18pt. descriptive text. Each category in the directory has several sub-categories listed, allowing searchers to drill down from the very general to the very specific information sites. Each link from YouSearched opens in a new window ensuring that users do not lose their initial search results as they move from one site to another.
The site layout has been designed to use oversized images with bright pastel colours and extra large font for people who have difficulty viewing pictures or making out traditionally smaller sized fonts. Visitors using a screen-reader will have the text on their monitor read to them with an approximation of the location where various links can be found on the page. Visitors using a braille device will have the contents of the site printed for them in braille. Visitors who have less severe visual impairments should be able to read the oversized font and make out changes in colour and texture of the large image icons. Even the keyword text-box is larger than normal with 24pt, bolded font.
Populating an accessible search engine can be more difficult than actually creating one. Results are currently purchased from the UK based paid-placement search tool E-Spotting, however most websites are not designed to be accessible. Until the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) mandates accessibility as a validation requirement, site developers and designers may not be aware of the positive impact of accessible design techniques.
According to StepForth CEO Ross Dunn, "This experience has been an eye-opener for me. Before this project began I only had an inkling of what accessibility meant. Now, however, I can see the importance of accessible web design and I plan on not only implementing it on StepForth's network of sites but to recommend it to all our clients. It looks like our accessibility expert at Rose Rock Design, Lee Roberts, will be getting a lot of work in the future!"
YouSearched.Com has been in beta testing for about two months and has received endorsements from the Royal National Institute for the Blind. By meeting or exceeding accessibility standards as set out by the W3C, Watchfire's Bobby Guidelines, and the US Federal Government (section 508 guidelines), the development team at YouSearched.Com has created an extremely useful search tool that may help bring higher standards to web development in the future and truly make the web an accessible environment for everyone.
Google announced the development of a desktop based search tool that sounds an awful lot like the plans for Microsoft's new operating system Longhorn. Due to be released in early-mid 2006, the Longhorn operating system is said to fully integrate search with the O/S, making any file your computer has ever accessed a searchable document. These files would include items from your hard drive, corporate Intranet and the common Internet. The idea behind the move was to a) create a better operating system that allows users to find information from a far greater range of documents, and b) to take large amounts of market share away from other (non-MS) search tools. Google is trying to counter this threat by introducing its own desktop based system that will have similar features to those found in Longhorn. According to today's technology section of the New York Times which broke this story, the new software is being code named "Puffin". (subscription to NYTimes required) As Google made this announcement this morning, there has (thus far) been no response from Microsoft.
For some time now Google's publishing partners and advertisers have been requesting image based advertising through the AdSense and AdWords programs, and Google is listening.
Currently still in Beta, Google has introduced image ads into its AdSense / AdWords program.
Much like traditional Google AdWords ads, image ads will be displayed based on associated keyword targets, however, will only be shown on content sites. Webmasters participating in the AdSense program will have the choice to display text ads, or a combination of text and image ads. Google will automatically determine weather it thinks an image or text ad is more likely to generate revenue and serve up according. Currently webmasters do not have the ability to display only image ads, but as the program grows and more and more advertisers begin using images, Google will likely allow this option.
Google image ads are available in 4 major, traditional formats, 468x60, 728x90, 120x600 and 300x250. These are only accepted in unanimated .jpeg, .gif, or .png formats and are limited to 50K in size. (examples) AdWords advertisers, when creating new ads, have the option of uploading an image instead of creating text ads. At the bottom of each image the destination URL will be made visible along with a link to a Google feedback form on the relevancy of the ad.
Image ads are restricted to contextual ads on content sites and Google says there are no plans on using image ads at Google.com.
Not long ago the popularity of banner ads slipped with the rise in text-based advertising. Google image ads are not much different then the traditional banner ads, with the exception of the lack of animation. Just how well they'll do is anybody's guess, and I for one, am interested to see the outcome. This just may trigger a strong comeback in banner advertising.
For the past two weeks I have covered the topic of keyword research. If you are a new subscriber or did not get a chance to read the last articles they can be found online. They covered:
In this crucial first step in the optimization there is an additional aspect of choosing your keywords that has yet to be covered and that is how to choose multiple keyword phrases to target in a single promotion.
Lets take for example a baby shoes company. Having recently done a review for a fantastic baby shoes manufacturer I noticed that there were many different phrases that could be targeted from "baby shoes" and "kids shoes" to "baby booties" and "booties". So how do we choose the phrases to target?
One might start under the assumption that choosing those with the highest number of searches would be the obvious choice. There are two reasons why this may not be the case. The first was brought up the last week's article in which it is pointed out that the various competition levels must be considered. The second reason is specific to those who wish to target multiple keyword phrases in a single promotion.
While it is possible to rank for completely separate phrases (for example: "baby shoes" and "booties") if you wish to target multiple phrases in a single promotion you will have much greater success if you choose phrases with a common thread. What is meant by this is that if you can choose a single keyword that ties multiple phrases together (the word "shoes" or "baby" for example) you will find that you have a much greater level of success. This is for a number of reasons.
First, the search engines are becoming smarter. They are looking for common threads among the pages of your website. If they visit one page that focuses on the phrase "baby shoes" and find that through the rest of your site there is little on no mention of either of those words again then the relevancy of those words (as far as the search engines are concerned) is very low. If you have targeted phrases with a common word across your site however ("baby shoes" and "baby booties") and keep the word "baby" mentioned consistently throughout your website this will build a relevancy for this keyword and also the keyword phrases you are targeting.
An additional benefit in this approach is in the building on links to your website. The text that is used to link to your site (called "anchor text") also builds the relevancy of those specific keywords on your site.Thus, if the anchor text to your site reads "baby shoes" and you are targeting "baby booties" on a separate page the relevancy of the word "baby" is further reinforced through the links and will additionally benefit the targets on other pages.
On the other side of that, if you are targeting completely different phrases the links to your site will have far less relevancy for the other phrases and you will either have to additionally build links using different keywords or suffer the reduced rankings that will be attained.
So do your research, find multiple phrases with a common thread, and cast a big net. One targeted phrase per page should be your limit and keep them related. Do this right and you'll find a lot of fish jump right into your net. 24 hours a day, 365 day a year.
In a report to be issued very soon, the Washington DC based think tank, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, claims that Linus Torvalds is not the original author of the open-source movement's premier software. According to the president of the Institution, Kenneth Brown, Linux was created on the back of, "...intellectual property often taken or adapted without permission from material owned by other companies and individuals."
According to the EWeek article from writer Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Torvalds' response to the allegation is,
"OK, I admit it. I was just a front man for the real fathers of Linux: the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. They (for obvious reasons) couldn't step forward to admit that they had gotten bitten by the computer bug and had been developing a series of operating systems on their own during the off-season.
"But when they started with Linux (which they originally called Freax, they do feel like outsiders, you know, and that's a whole sad story in itself), they felt that they could no longer just let it languish in obscurity.
"They started to look for a front man, and since Santa Claus is from Finland, and thus has connections to Helsinki University, and the Easter Bunny claimed, 'He's got good ears, if a bit small,' I got selected.
"Since then, I've lived a life of subterfuge, always afraid that somebody would find out the truth. I'm actually relieved that it's over, and that the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has finally uncovered the lie. I can now go back to my chosen profession, the exploration of the fascinating mating dance of the aquatic African frog."
I just left the Optimizing for Flash and Non-HTML session. Gregory Markel from Infuse Creative announced (on Macromedia's behalf) that Macromedia has formed a focused project group to address issues with SEO and FLASH. This announcement was backed by Karen Howe, founder of Singing Fish who is also working with Macromedia on FLASH/SEO solutions.
Gotta get to the next session: Writing for Search Engines.
I am at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto. This is my first post from the conference and there is a lot to talk about. The show itself is extremely well organized and the weather in Toronto is beautiful. I have spent most of my time speaking with whomever I can find to speak with. The first two sessions I attended were dealt with basic SEO topics with the more advanced sessions being held this afternoon and tomorrow. This afternoon I will be attending a session regarding PPC campaigns. More later, sessions are about to begin again.
It appears that Time Warner is looking to dump its AOL unit and both Yahoo and MSN are interested. This story is just starting to develop so there will be a lot more written about this soon.
Aside from the massive changes a sale of AOL will bring to the SEO world, this move would, in my mind, mark the end of the Dot-Bomb era. AOL actually purchased Time Warner at the height of the Tech-Boom but has been more of a financial millstone around TW's neck ever since. The sale would likely breathe new life into AOL but, if MSN completes the purchase, would mark the destruction of Netscape.
The Internet is the most widely used business tool in the world. In theory, it is the least expensive and most pervasive medium for global communications. At one time, the Internet was the exclusive playground of the technical minded, otherwise known as the "nerds" and the "geeks". It's not nearly as cool to be a geek as it was five or six years ago. The Internet is not our exclusive playground any longer. As proven by last week's Google IPO, the sandbox in which we shared ideas and inspiration is now the largest commercial community in the world. Everyone who is anyone in business uses it and therefore, everyone who is associated with anyone in business needs to be able to use it quickly and easily. As acceptance and usage of the Internet has grown so rapidly, every business, NGO, governmental department, school, church, and even favorite great-aunt has developed a website to communicate their message to the greater world. In order to meet a growing demand, programmers and designers have had to develop products that are easy to use for employees all businesses, regardless of those employee's technical ability. The world of basic HTML has, for the most part, gone the way of the dinosaur.
Welcome to the world of Content Management Systems (CMS) A Content Management System is generally defined as software that allows anyone to contribute information to a website via a graphical user interface (GUI). They are usually based on a pre-written template that acts as a platform for each page in the site as those pages are created. From simple CMS systems built on PHP-Nuke to extremely complicated proprietary systems, the use of CMS in commercial websites can present significant challenges to search engine spiders and obviously to search engine optimizers. One of the problems is the development field is still quite young, even in Internet years and, for the most part, there is no form of standardization in the creation of CMS systems. This lack of standardization creates several unique issues that need to be addressed in order to advance a strong SEO campaign. For us, the biggest issue is the fact that each new CMS system presents a new learning curve which eats hours of billable time. As SEOs don't like to charge our clients for our own education, CMS contracts often have hidden costs for SEOs.
Template Structures Templates for CMS developed sites should provide the SEO with as much leeway as possible. In my experience, most templates are extremely rigid, providing very little room to make the necessary modifications to a site needed to achieve strong placements. If you are developing a site from the ground floor, or if you are a template designer, I strongly recommend getting a professional SEO involved in the process. Even on a basic consultancy basis, a good SEO can tell you which elements need to be fluid and which elements can be left static. It is also important to provide a different template for the INDEX page as there are important areas on the INDEX page that must be made open for SEOs to work in. Designing templates with search engine optimization in mind goes a long way to guaranteeing a strong and successful promotion.
URLs Most CMS systems are designed around sites with highly dynamic content, often drawn from a database. As most databases continue to use extraneous characters in the URL paths such as the "?", "&" and "=", along with numeric datacodes, it is almost impossible to keyword enrich internal URL paths without redesigning an entire database. While search engines are now able to transit through almost any URL path without too much difficulty, the common use of extraneous characters in database production removes a fairly powerful tool from the hands of your SEO. Again, this is a case in which consulting with a professional SEO firm during the initial development stage may put your business one step ahead of your competition. Finding work-arounds and clear-paths for URLs is much easier in development than it is finding solutions for sites that are already being used, linked to from external sources, and added to by your employees.
Titles, tags and footers Perhaps this section should have been included in the Template Structure section but I feel so strongly about this I think it needs its own section. Titles, meta-data and footers are among the most powerful tools in our inventory, and most CMS systems we've worked with severely limit our ability to make changes in these site elements. We have turned clients away when their tech-department tells us we won't be able to place specific titles, meta-data and footers on unique pages. Imagine being asked to conduct a multi-keyword phrase campaign but being told you could only use one universal title across an entire website. This happens too frequently with CMS developed sites and is rather akin to handcuffing your SEO and asking him or her grab a bat and hit a homerun.
The same can be said for footers. One of our simpler but more powerful tools is the use of text-based navigation maps applied to the bottom of each page in a site. While this should be standard practice for site designers, it is often overlooked. Placing a footer on a CMS site should be as simple as writing an include file but is often far more difficult and in some cases, impossible. Designers should note how important it is to provide clear paths for spiders to follow from the start of a site to the last page of a site.
One of the biggest challenges for SEOs today, regardless of the technology used to build a site is stating a theme or topic for the website in such a way that various search tools can group the site in amongst other sites with similar topics. While much of the information needed to provide a theme is found in the body text, the description meta tag is, in my mind, extremely important. The necessity to provide a topical description meta tag is even more important when one is trying to achieve placements for multiple keyword phrases as internal pages will need to rank well in order to get multiple placements. Many CMS systems limit the meta data to one set of universal tags. This limitation makes multiple placements very difficult to achieve. Designers of CMS systems should go out of their way to allow for specific titles and meta data for unique pages.
Several Cooks or Too Many Changes Spoil the Broth A final issue with content management systems, modern business and SEO is the aspect of a multi-user website with several departments or persons updating the site. This has been a constant issue with CMS systems for several reasons. The first reasons is totally logical. Businesses need to change product information and sales information from time to time. Often, the busier a business, the more changes are necessary. Provided a business lets their SEO know what changes will happen and when, this issue can be dealt with. As CMS systems makes these changes easy, it is worth noting that changes will happen with more frequency. This may necessitate a 100% paid-inclusion submission model in which the website owner is paying search engines for extra attention from spiders, or an XML feed to Yahoo under the SiteMatch XChange program to ensure Yahoo receives the freshest data each day. A more difficult issue is the ease in which different departments, sometimes in different geographic locations can update a section of a website, often overwriting work the SEO has performed. This happens because the CMS system has freed the client's company from having to pass all changes through the company geek before those changes could make it online. (Now everyone in the company can be the geek.) What is missing is the control point telling the other site contributors that their contributions may damage a well planned SEO campaign. The only way we've found around this problem is to issue a policy notice stating that multiple changes to a site will have a detrimental effect on search engine placements.
CMS is the Future There is no way around it. CMS is an important innovation that will be used more and more often in the months to come. There are a number of resources online that can help CMS designers and users of CMS systems but the most comprehensive we've come across is CMS Watch. I strongly recommend a visit. In the meantime, businesses using CMS systems should communicate with their SEO team regularly and set out a series of standards for updates and new product information. CMS designers should consult with an SEO company they can communicate with on a regular basis.
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