18

Sep 09

Things you should consider when choosing a CMS

Posted to SEO, Web // No comments

1. Multiple site support

Clients or web companies which manage a big amount of websites, should consider this as an option. Modifying multiple websites with the same login can save you a lot of time.

2. Multiple language support

You need to think twice before choosing a CMS, if it supports multiple language. You may think you businees does not currently need multiple language, but your target audience could change, and it is bether to prepare yourself for that.

3. CMS Editors

I ran into a lot of types of editors using different types of opens sources CMS’s  like Wordpress, Joomla, Magento or Drupal. Feature I consider a Editor should have:

a. Code clean-up. When writing articles, clients often use copy-paste action from Microsoft Word or any other program. An Editor which does not do code clean up will mess up your W3C Code  Validation.

b. Editors need to be very easy customizable. It is important you can easily add or delete features from the editors menu, according to your clients needs.

c. Image insert: make sure that by inserting an image, you will have also the possibility to insert alt attributes.

4. Assets Management

Be sure the CMS can easily manage image and media files. It would be great you can easily create image galleries.

Attachements for articles is also a nice feature to have. Users should have the possibility of attaching PDF, Word, Excel files to their articles.

6. Optimization for Search Engines

A good CMS should provide: url rewriting, page title management, insertion of alt attributes to images, description for attached documents, in order to deliver a google friendly website.

7. Menu management

Very important feature for menu management is that the CMS allows you to create tree menus and you can easily add articles to menus.

8. User interaction

Today interacting with you users is very important, so it would be nice that you will be able easily to create forms, or allowing users to comment your articles.

9. Rolls and permissions

You can get into the situation when a website it’s administrated by more than one user, or you might want to restrict users acces for certain features. In order to that your CMS should support permission. Some basic user management should allow you to create: Super Administrators, Editors, Publishers or Registered users type.

You may also want to read to orriginal article by Paul Boag.

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27

Apr 09

10 basic tips for better SEO

Posted to SEO, Webdesign // No comments

1. Domain name:

Choosing a domain name is very relevant for having a good referenced website. Keywords should be used in the process of choosing a domain name.

2. Keywords in URL:

The url of each page should contain relevant keywords. For dynamical generated pages via PHP scripting language we need to use URL REWRITING in order to display keyword in URL.

Example: an url for a product page which looks like: www.domain-name.com/product.php?id=10 can be displayed like www.domain-name.com/fruits.html

3. Keywords in title tag:

The title tag for each page should contain 10-60 characters, no special characters are allowed.

4. Keywords used in BODY:

The keywords used in the body of an html page should appear as bold, italic, or in h1, h2, h3 tags. It is important that the density of the keywords is not bigger than 20% of the total amount of words on the page. Tricks like hidding keywords by using different css techniques will not help.

Text should not appear in images or in flash files, since search engines cannot read them.

5. Keywords used in description and Meta Tag:

Google and other search engines don’t actually rely on this tags, but is important to have them complete. Not more than 200 words are allowed.

6. Keywords in alt tags:

Each image of your website should have an alt tag in which you enter a short description of you image.

7. Menu:

The menu of a web site should not be made using flash. The links should contain kewords. All internal links need to be valid.

8. Number of pages:

Search engines like big websites with lot of pages. In order to have a proper referencement you need to build it up by using as many pages as possible.

9. Website update:

The content of your website needs to be updated constantly. Search engines enjoy fresh pages.

10. Page Rank:

Try to imporve your Page Rank by increasing the number of links to you. You should publish your website on as many quality portals as possible. (ex: www.cssmania.com, www.cssremix.com, etc …)

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