Search Engine Friendly website Structure
I had briefly explained the importance of site structure in my last post. I had mentioned that the title is the most important factor in Search Engine Optimization. Besides that it is also very useful to have an unique description for each page. The description is often shown by the search engines below the title as a snippet in the search results. I had at one time have a look at a website which the site owners wanted to optimize. The site in question belonged to a leading travel travel agency and an office at a prominent place in one of the state capitals of India. They had paid a handsome amount just to setup the Content management system.
The CMS in question could not even generate unique titles for each page, let alone the other tags such as descriptions. The url just contains a number to reference the page. The actual content of the home page started out at page 5 in the Lynx browser . Lynx if you are not yet aware is a text based browser which closely resembles the way search engine bots like Google bot index web pages. In fact the Google webmaster guidelines suggest use of Lynx to identify any potential accessibility problems in your website.
Such a website CANNOT be optimized.
Minimum Requirements of Search Engine Friendly CMS
The minimum requirement is that required is at least the ability to have an unique page title for each page and all the pages of the site should be accessible. The other strongly recommended features is a unique description for each page as well as a search engine friendly url if possible. Search engine friendly extensions may be required for certain Content Management Systems. The latest version of Joomla has a URL rewriting feature built in but it has to be activated from the control panel and Apache Mod rewrite has to be enabled by the web host. Wordpress requires an extension to enable unique descriptions as well as some other Seo features.
Now, coming back to the site that I was discussing. The only page that can be optimized for such a website is the home page. This can be achieved by inserting the necessary tags in the code of the CMS. However these tags will be the same for each and every page of the site.
