Making your content search engine friendly
Much of your website traffic will come from search engines. To ensure your website is findable, you need to write and mark up your content in a way that allows the search engine to present the most relevant results. Put another way, search engine friendly content will get more relevant traffic to your site.
What makes a site search engine friendly? Two things:
- • Relevant content.
- • A site built to standards, in other words, in an accessible way.
Search engine friendliness and accessibility are very closely related - you can think of Google as just another blind user.
SilverStripe CMS automatically does a number of things that make your site search-engine friendly and accessible. As a website editor, you don't have to concern yourself with the code side of things. However, there is much you can do to when it comes to your content:
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• Post relevant content. This may sound obvious, but it's the most important thing you can do as an editor. If your content is relevant to your users, your site wil rank higher for the search terms they are using.
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• If it's important to you to rank highly for specific phrases, it's key to literally mention these phrases in the first paragraph of relevant pages on the site. The absolute best way to rank number one is to have dedicated pages for these phrases. In the title of these pages would be the phrases you wish to rank for.
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• Use CMS tools for to properly mark up your content.
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• Ensure correct spelling across all your content - typos make the site rank lower.
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• Ensure there are no broken links in your site - again, broken links will make your site rank lower.
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• Provide text alternatives for media content, such as ALT text for your images, since search engines can't see images, just their descriptions.
URLs, page names, titles and navigation labels
When you first create a new page, start by entering its name in the Page name field on the "Content" tab. SilverStripe CMS automatically populates a number of other fields based on that name. You can leave them as is, or change them individually.
Why should you care? It's useful to know where and how the different names are displayed.
- • The Page name is what generates the main headline (the <h1> tag) for the page's content.
- • The Navigation label is what appears in your site's navigation. Sometimes when you have a lengthy page name, it makes sense to create a shortened navigation label.
- • The URL gets generated based on the page name, using the words and dashes. Human-readable URLs make a page more easily found by search engines. Most of the time, the URL that SilveStripe CMS generates will be fine, but you can manually change it if necessary.
- • The Title is what appears in the browser's title bar and tabs, and in Google's search results page (the <title> meta tag.) Page titles should be unique, and shouldn’t exceed 65 characters (spaces included), as Google only shows the first 65 characters in search result titles.
Tip: We will have configured your site for either simple or hierarchical or URLs.
Simple URLs only use a single level of depth. For example, a page for a staff member might be called "John Smith", and its URL would be http://website.com/john-smith. Simple URLs are short and memorable, however, you are more likely to have multiple pages with the same name.
If a URL is already in use, the CMS will generate URLs with numbers, e.g., /staff-members-1, /staff- members-2, etc.
In this case, it's a good idea to manually change the URLs to something more meaningful, such as /staff-members-berlin, /staff-members-hong-kong.
Hierarchical URLs provide a logical path for a page as it exists in the site's structure. In our example, this might be http://website.com/offices/new-york/staff/john-smith
Keywords and meta tags
Meta tags also make your web page more findable. The Description meta attribute should contain a concise and relevant summary of what the page contains. This will show in search engine results, and helps visitors understand the content of the page.
Keywords can be used to further describe your page, and help to make your page more findable by search engines. Think about the words users would type in a search engine to find your pages, and make sure that your page includes those words within it.
Tip: Google doesn’t like repetition of keywords and phrases in the title, description or keywords. It sees this as 'keyword stuffing', which is looked at as search engine spam (not good!) Avoid this.
Clean HTML
Avoid cutting and pasting directly from a word processor with the standard cut and paste functions. Always "Paste from Word" if using Microsoft Word, or "Paste as Text" if using another word processor. Word processors tend to do poor jobs of creating web markup code and often insert extraneous code which make your site less search-engine friendly and accessible.