It’s safe to assume that almost all content managers and marketing departments realize the power of great SEO. Getting found for a keyword-rich phrase that relates to your company’s products and offerings is invaluable. Often times, a web development company will introduce SEO at the beginning of your design (or redesign). Other times, you might find yourself searching for an SEO vendor that can give your website the “golden touch” years after your launch. However, paying attention to some minor details in your CMS (content management system) can give your pages a better shot at ranking well in search engines.

Make sure you can edit your Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

An example of how a title and meta description are rendered in a result page.

These two items should certainly be editable in your CMS. When you perform a search in a search engine (we’ll use Google as an example), results are returned in the order that Google deems most relevant. The blue headline is actually the Page Title, and the text underneath is the Meta Description. It’s important these two items are unique and relevant to each page on your website. Bolded words are words used in your search. Use rich keywords in both of these whenever you can, but be careful not to overload your keywords tp try to gain an edge – search engines are very smart these days. Make it natural.

Link to other pages on your website using accurate words

The way search engine algorithms work can get pretty complicated, but a huge part deals with linking. Search engines take a hard look at links that point away from your site, links that point into your site from other sites, and links that connect pages together on your website. When they look at all these links, they not only look at how reputable pages are in relation to each other, but they look at the text that the link is composed of. See how I linked to another Bridgeline blog post a few sentences ago? I could have said “Click Here” and taken you to the page, but now I’ve given the user and the search engines a better understanding about what that page is about. Take the time to think about your link text when you create your links (internal and external).

Be proactive by creating continuous content

If you control the content being published on your website, you should always be thinking of publishing more of it. Websites that are successful in SEO always provide fresh content for search engines to “crawl”. Blogs are highly valuable for SEO. Perhaps you can publish your offline press releases on your website? Would it benefit your users and SEO to archive certain content rather than simply updating your content on one page?

Below are a couple resources for further reading. You’d be surprised what you can do from a content-editing standpoint. Good luck!

Resources

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Guide

From Bing: Links – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly