Best Practices: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Seeds CMS was designed to give your website every chance to perform well naturally in Search Engine Optimisation, commonly known by it acronym SEO. Successfully getting your website to appear in the top search engine results is very often a difficult task, and requires juggling between various strategies to make sure your website's content is properly understood by search engine crawler robots (aka spiders), and stands out compared to your competitors.

Well-written, coherent, relevant and high-quality content

Important: search engines and in particular Google continually change their search results algorithms for various reasons, often to make sure that websites are not cheating to get to the top of the results pages. Over the past months and years, the big focus has been to make sure that the content of a page/website is interesting to the user, relative to their search, and also displays correctly in their browser. So your primary focus when writing your website's content should always be that it is coherent with what you're offering/writing about, well-written (don't hesitate to get your content proof-read by professionals), and containing keywords or key phrases in their context multiple times (without too much repetition as this could be detected as an attempt to SPAM the search engine results!).

With all that in mind, the easiest way to ensure that your content has a good chance of performing well within search engines (and among users in general) is to look at it from a visitor's point of view. If they see a page full of images and randomly placed keywords, then there is not much interest for them to visit your page/website. However if they find your webpage in search results, and your content can bring them some more information about the topic they were searching for (and hopefully further interest in what you're writing/offering), then this is the first step to successful content-writing.

Sesame Web, creators of Seeds CMS, offer a proof-reading service, and translation service if you are interested. They will always make sure that your content is of high quality and relevance.

A little more technical: website and page settings

In the background of a webpage, you can specify certain things directly aimed at search engines to help them understand your website better. Warning: due to abusive use of these methods (such as the keywords tag for example), some of this information is now ignored or used only in conjunction with the actual displayed content of your webpage (content in your headings and paragraphs), so it is very important to set your primary focus on good quality content as described above.

Some of the settings you can use on a page-by-page level, to help with your website's presence in search engine results are:

  • coherent and well formed URLs: ideally these should be humanly readable (as opposed to something such as www.example.com/?page=1 for example which does not provide much information as to what the page might contain), and also contain keywords relevant to the actual content of the page.
  • page titles: these are easy to change and should, similarly to URLs, contain keywords relevant to the content of your page. They are the bit of text search engines will show to searchers on the link, so keep them concise and coherent! (A general rule of thumb is to keep the length of the title under 55 characters long.) Note that Seeds CMS can also prepend or append the Title with a prefix or suffix that you specify in Settings > Website > SEO in your site's admin panel. When you create a page, the URL is initially based on this title - but you can change it and keep the URL different if you prefer.
     More info on the Title tag on Moz's website.
  • page description: this snippet of text is not visible directly on your web page, however it is the text usually used by search engines to describe your page, underneath the link to your page. Ideally it should be kept to less than 160 characters. If this information is not provided, search engines will use the first paragraph of your web page that they have detected. We recommend you specify this for each of your pages, but Seeds CMS also provides the ability to specify a "site default" description (in the admin panel, under Settings > Website > SEO), which will be used if the page's description is blank. Once again, make sure your page's descriptions are well-written, coherent with your content, and contain the keywords related to your content.
  • page keywords: this setting works similarly to the above description setting, and should contain comma separated keywords (in lower case) related to the content of your page. This information has been abused in the past by people wanting to cheat their way up search engine rankings, so it is being increasingly ignored entirely by search engines.
  • sitemaps: it is recommended to submit your website's sitemap to search engines for example, as it helps them know exactly which pages to crawl and look for. Seeds CMS contains an automatic sitemap generated at it installation root: www.your-website.com/sitemap.php (see the sitemap for this documentation site as an example). If you have submitted your sitemap, and then changed the order of your pages, then don't forget to re-submit your sitemap to update the information search engines have!
    Google's Webmaster Tools includes information about how to submit your sitemap.
  • translations linking: if your website is available in multiple languages, Seeds CMS will automatically provide link tag information (in the background) to search engines, telling them that your content is also available in other languages. This helps them to suggest the relevant pages to a French person, for example, if your site is available in English and French. If you don't link pages (which is easily done with the Pages > Translations Manager in the admin panel), then Seeds CMS will provide the default page in the translated language as a link.
  • interesting & up-to-date content: a lot of websites have pages that have not been changed since they were first written several years ago, and in an age where we use Facebook etc. daily, a website with up-to-date content is crucial for keeping people (and therefore search engines!) interested in you. So it is very good practice to have a part of your website (if not the entire website) with information that gets updated regularly, or to include a blog to keep people coming back to your site.
  • linking to your website on social media: Don't write content on your social media pages directly! Write it on your website, and link to it on your various social media outlets with a teaser, encouraging people to visit your website. You have spent time, effort and money creating your website, so use social media to help being visitors to it, instead of giving away all your content on those platforms. The more your content is updated, the more popular it (or your website) will become, and therefore the better it will rank in search engine results!

Secured connection

Over the past weeks and months, Google have announced that they will eventually give preference to websites providing a secured connection over those who do not. A secured connection requires your web host provider to allow SSL connection (via HTTPS), and you will probably have already encountered websites with this functionality if you have bought something online. Website with a secured connection usually show a green padlock in the browser's address bar to show that the page is secure.

These connections often come at a slightly higher cost than non-secured connections with your hosting provider, but if you are able to serve your website over HTTPS, then we recommend you do so.

If a secured connection is permitted by your hosting provider then Seeds CMS provides a setting which will force visitors to use this secured connection via a 301 Permanent Redirect. This means the visitor's browser will redirect the user to the HTTPS URL. Important: some browsers and some search engines will remember this information in their cache, so if you have enforced this and wish to revert, you may have to force all visitors to clear your browser's cache!

Further reading

A simple search of search engine optimisation in Google will provide you with an incredible amount of information, but we recommend these particular resources as they are usually very clear or in-depth: