Selecting a Search Engine compliant CMS is essential to effective SEO. Specifically the following points would provide for an ideal environment:-
1. Urls are generated such that the names include target keyphrases, for example
www.yoursite.co.uk/blue-widgets
NOT –
http://www.yoursite.com/bvsn/bvcom/ep/home.do?tabId=3&BV_SessionID=EngineID =cccd
2. The CMS will allow for all metadata, on a page by page basis, to be completely editable, specifically the CMS will allow for the following metadata to be added to each page and edited:-
Title tag
Description tag
Keyword tag
H1 tag
Alt tag
NB. When on page metadata is edited the existing url name needs to be kept the same.
Separate fields in the CMS admin system should be presented to the user for each of the above tags such that it is as easy as possible for the user to enter appropriate metadata
3. On page textual content should be editable in a similar fashion to the above – ie a specific field should be presented to the user to prompt for on page textual content for each page. This text should be formatable in a similar fashion to a Word document. The user should be able to easily incorporate anchor text based links to other pages.
4. The CMS should allow for new pages to be added to the site easily. In these cases the user needs to ability to specify the url of the page and, as above, metadata and on page textual content needs to be prompted for and editable.
The CMS needs to be flexible enough to allow for different design/page layouts to be incorporated going forwards.
5. The CMS needs to allow for new navigation menus to be produced to enable reference to any new pages.
6. Ideally the metadata and page urls should be generated automatically when products/content is entered to save time. However in this case the metadata and new content need to be separately editable without it affecting the url. (In cases where it does 301 redirection needs to be automated to transfer equity from old page to new)
