Your Content Management System (CMS) is essential for maintaining your search engine optimization (SEO) and reaching wider audiences. Imagine launching your new website using a CMS that portrays itself as completely user-friendly. Your website looks awesome, but a few weeks, maybe even months, go by, and your website traffic has fallen off the map.
What's likely happened here is that in your haste to launch your website, you failed to optimize it for search engines, meaning your website isn't reaching your audience. While it's very tempting to get a website launched ASAP, it can turn around and bite you if you don't plan properly.
There are a lot of things to consider when you're choosing a CMS that's going to work for you and your team. But you have to make sure SEO doesn't fall between the cracks during this process by understanding what makes CMS SEO-friendly.
You just so happened to be in luck – REM Web Solutions is not only an expert in SEO and marketing but also provides our own CMS system, WebWiz@rd, which we’ll explore a little bit more later.
Ability to Customize SEO Metadata
One of the key features that will take your CMS to the next level is a high potential for customization, particularly when it comes to SEO metadata. This includes meta descriptions, URLs, titles, and alt text – all of which can be optimized for SEO.
Now, that doesn't mean that a very simple website with a standard template is necessarily bad, but when you're operating a unique business, you need customizable tools that provide you with more control over your website's metadata.
It's also essential to remember that your URL structure is vital to your website's SEO. Just like your consumers, search engines like clean, concise URLs over those that drag out and border on irrelevant. Your CMS should allow you to customize these URLs to make them concise and relevant. Here's what makes a good URL:
- Descriptive
- Concise and simple
- Accurate to the description
- Using real words (avoid jargon)
- Use hyphens to separate words
- Uses lowercase letters
- Indicates to users and search engines what they can expect from the page.
Example of a SEO-optimized URL:
www.example.com/10-tips-for-effective-content-marketing (NOT A REAL URL)
Mobile Compatibility and Cross-Platform Integration
Google favours mobile-first indexing, meaning Google uses the mobile version of your website's content and crawls with the smartphone agent to index and rank it. This plays an essential role in your search rankings. Your CMS needs to have mobile-friendly templates to make sure your website isn't being ignored by the Google SEO bots.
It's essential to have a CMS that's designed with omnichannel capability so content can be easily adapted across the mobile, web, AI chat, voice, and other platforms that are relevant to your audience.
High-Performing Site Delivery
Businesses need their websites to keep up – if your website loads slowly, isn't intuitive, and overall hasn't been optimized to the high standards of internet consumers, customers will click away. You need to be able to take full advantage of the best engineering for fast-loading sites that can handle even heavy foot traffic. These features have to be incorporated into the CMS itself and require some thoughtfully designed APIs that work effortlessly with high-performing static site generators or alternative front-end frameworks.
Content Creation Customization
The best CMS SEO is one that enables your content developers to create content the way they see fit – optimized and all. Now, this is going to be completely different based on the content developer. Some teams prefer a more simplified drag-and-drop template, while other teams prefer to be more hands-on and have a greater deal of control over their work – which can include advanced permissions. Your content needs to be customized to your business and content team.
Generating XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap refers to a file that lists a website's most essential pages, ensuring Google can easily find them and crawl them. You need to have a CMS that will automatically generate and update that sitemap, ensuring that new content or updates are quickly found by Google and indexed without stress. This ensures that you're always ranking well in organic search results.
Without having this implemented, search engines won't be able to effectively find and index the pages of your website, especially when you have a more complicated website or page structure that is otherwise not accessible through internal links.
Comprehensive Data Support
Having comprehensive, properly structured data allows Google to understand the nature of your content better and show it in search results more effectively. This means your pages could appear in several search listings via star ratings and other results, providing a more clickable search result.
A CMS that has comprehensive data support allows you to easily set your pages up to appear visibly in search results, thereby increasing user engagement on your website. You can use AI to do this for you.
Additional Tips for Success
Some extra steps can always be taken to maximize the success of your website. Before we close out, let's explore a few more key points to keep in mind:
1) Target Relevant Topics
- Your business offers a unique set of products or services that fall within a given niche. You can't target too broad of an audience through your content, or you aren't guaranteed to find those seeking out what your business has to offer. For example, if you're a business that offers beginner-friendly crocheting kits and tools, good content marketing could include search queries such as "crochet kits for beginners" or "best crochet kits for beginners." But it can go deeper than that.
- You can expand this reach by looking for other relevant topics, such as: "best gifts for beginner crocheters" or "relaxing crochet kits for newbies," depending on how you market your products.
2) Increase Your Backlinking Profile
- We've previously discussed the significance of backlinking, but it's worth reiterating just how crucial backlinks are for online visibility. Backlinking signals to search engines that other sites consider your content valuable enough to reference, while linking to other authoritative sites can enhance your own site's credibility.
- High-quality content is a powerful asset for generating link-worthy web pages, as it ensures your content is well-researched and aligns with industry standards. You can employ various engaging strategies, such as writing from a thought leadership perspective, creating in-depth and comprehensive guides, or incorporating interactive elements to boost your content's appeal.
Easy Content Management with WebWiz@rd™
We understand there’s a lot of CMS software to choose from. REM Web Solutions offers cutting-edge CMS software that is easy to use and makes updating your website seamless and efficient.
Your Website Needs Content to Thrive
Our content management system provides you with the tools you need to manage and update your site with ease:
- Photo Gallery
- Blog
- Banner
- Form Builder
- Newsletter
- Email Page to a Friend
- Full-Text Search
- Printer Friendly
- Secured Page Content
- Advertisement Engine
- Digital Plans Room
- eCommerce
- Events (Event Calendar)
- Secured File Transfer
- Locations
- Meta Tag Management
- Newsletter Groups
- Newsflash
Typical Website Model vs. WebWiz@rd CMS
The typical website model requires a webmaster to completely manage everything on their own; that means content updates, back-and-forth communication, timely emails, and long wait times for changes and approvals. Not with WebWiz@rd™ CMS.
When You Own a Business, You Know Time is Money
When you have REM’s WebWiz@rd™ Content Management System, you have the power to make all the necessary updates to your website without delays or losing out on SEO opportunities. Our intuitive system is specially crafted to give you the maximum control over your website without the need for delay.
You Can Change Your Content NOW
Many webmasters are going to charge you for every update, no matter how small. And, yes, that can include even tiny fixes or typos. While these may seem miniscule, it’s dollars out of your budget. REM Web Solutions empowers our clients with the tools they need to save money and manage their content independently, without additional charges.
Don’t Worry - Updates are Free for Life!
Our web development team will craft your website design based on your specifications and give your business a recognizable look and feel. From the time that your website goes live, you have unlimited flexibility and can add as much content and as many pages as you see fit.
We’re Always Updating It!
SEO is constantly evolving, so we’re constantly updating our WebWiz@rd™ CMS to keep up with the latest SEO best practices. Here are just a few recent and upcoming updates to WebWiz@rd™ that will help boost your SEO performance! These notes were kindly provided by our dearest developer, Sean McP. All credit goes to him!
- Coming soon: A new page title and description counter to page content module to make it easier for users to ensure their page meta info is SEO-friendly
- Constantly improving the automatically generated page metadata so search engines can easily understand the content of the page
- Meta Tag module was updated last year to easily allow clients to add and update default social sharing images that appear when you share your page on your sites and other platforms like Facebook
- Significant improvements have been made to page loading performance over the last year. This is very important when it comes down to SEO performance. This includes features such as lazy loading images, meaning images are only downloaded when visible in the browser.
Take control of your website content today with one of the industry’s most comprehensive CMS - WebWiz@rd™! Contact us to learn more.
