When building a website, it’s pretty much a given that it’ll be deployed using some sort of content management system (CMS) or blogging platform allowing the publisher or site owner to easily amend the website content.
Content management systems come in all flavours from open source to industrial-strength fully licensed software.

And when it comes to CMS support for SEO campaigns, they all vary in terms of quality.

If SEO is a key marketing strategy within your organisation, then your choice of CMS clearly needs to meet your SEO needs by way of an “SEO friendly CMS”.

Let’s look at the key considerations when choosing an SEO friendly CMS:

1. Metadata
Having manual control over your site metadata is a crucial part of any SEO campaign. Whilst your website might be dynamically publishing your page title tags, meta description and meta keywords, your CMS should offer you manual control over that content as well.

2. URLs and Category Management
Ideally you want to choose CMS that publishes search engine friendly URLs where category or file names contain plain English keyphrases separated by hyphens (yes I know this blog post uses underscores – we’re working on it!).
Something like: http://www.emarketeers.com/training-courses/mobile-marketing or preferable to http://www.emarketeers.com/course.php?courseid=123ABC

The latter contains little in the way of searchable keywords or keyphrases.

An SEO friendly CMS will also let you modify the category or directory names that appear in the URL without causing broken links on your site.

3. Link Anchor Text
Link anchor text is the text that appears in hyperlinks and is an important aspect to link building – whether internal or external backlinks.

Whilst it is standard for content management systems or blogging platforms to enable editors to create and control links within body text, not all will give you anchor text control over your navigation as some content management systems will match the anchor text with the target page name which isn’t necessarily the the most popular search term.

4. Link Validation
Before you launch a website, we recommend that you carry out a series of link validation tests. Broken links not only affect the human journey throughout a site, but they also hinder efficient spidering and indexing from search engines.

Link checkers such as the W3C Link Checker are great to use, but it would be good see a similar tool embedded with your content management system.

A good CMS will also allow you to change your folder or page link names and allow those changes to cascade throughout the site without causing broken links. MODx CMS does this by giving each page or folder an ID number within MODx. Any changes to the anchor text or location of that page (if moved), does not affect the ID number and hence maintains the integrity of the link on the website.

5. Sitemap Pages and XML files
Your CMS should be able to dynamically generate an HTML site map page. Ideally you should also have control over the anchor text in your links (see point 4).

Your content management system should also be able to dynamically generate an XML sitemap file in accordance with search engine standards. Some content management systems will ping search engines such as Google every time the sitemap is updated. An example piece of software that performs this function can be found at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com.

6. ALT Attributes
If your CMS or blogging platform doesn’t allow you to add ALT (alternative) attributes to your embedded files such as images, I’d reconsider your choice of software.

It’s one of the most basic functions that the simplest WYSWYG editors or blogging platforms will offer, and it not only assists your search engine optimisation, but it also improves your accessibility compliance.

7. 301 Redirects
It would be nice to see a CMS offering content editors the ability to set up 301 redirects (permanent redirects) without having to edit your .htaccess file or have access to the web admin control panel.

Furthermore, it is important to set up 301 redirects from folders with extensions such as index.html or default.html that redirect to the root. This helps overcomes duplicate content issues where more than one URL contains exactly the same content.

8. Custom 404 Pages
Ideally your CMS should allow you to create a custom error 404 page i.e. the server code for “this page has moved or is missing”.

When moving pages or migrating a website you may find that the search engine index contains URLs of old pages that don’t exist any more. Having a customised error 404 page that points users in the right direction can prevent you losing essential traffic to your website.

You might also want to consider a customised error 500 (server error) page, although I’d say that the former is more important.

9. PageRank Sculpting
Google PageRank sculpting is the technique of manually adding “no follow” tags to on-page links in order to gain manual control over Google PageRank within a site.

In order to carry out PageRank sculpting, your CMS should enable you to add “no follow” tags to all links contained within a page, whether these are part of your internal navigation, body copy/image links or external links.

10. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is one factor that can affect your chances of search index inclusion. If substantive amounts of content are duplicated either within your site/domain or outside of it, it can spell trouble with index inclusion.
A nice to have within a CMS would be a duplicate content checker similar to that found at Copyscape.

I appreciate that some of the above are more essential than others; equally this isn’t necessarily an exhaustive list, but hopefully this article should highlight some of the essentials when choosing an SEO friendly CMS.

Who should be involved from the start when building or refreshing a website? A web designer? A programmer? An information architect? All of these professionals have significant impact on your site’s look, functionality and infrastructure. But the person you also need to talk to from the beginning is an SEO web content writer.
Such trained writers understand what matters most to your customers once they get to your site: content. You may have the best-looking, easiest-to-navigate site on the web – but without the right words to make your offer stand out, your customers will simply go elsewhere.

Content is king
Mobile telecoms operators recognised years ago (to their profit) that content is king. And at its most basic, content for the web is words. How you use these in your site can make the difference between someone staying and buying from you, or going and buying from someone else.

This is why you need an SEO web content writer. Hiring a web design agency filled with talented web designers and bright technologists who know every acronym from AJAX to XML is great. But they won’t look at every single word on every single page of your site. A web content writer trained in SEO techniques will.

One writer, one voice
You wouldn’t let every departmental head in your business define your corporate brand. So why let them co-write your corporate site? That way lies inconsistency of tone and presentation. A web content writer knows this – and knows how to ensure your business speaks with a clear and consistent ‘voice’. He or she will turn all your essential information into a site that gets noticed. And not just by Google.

As easy as ABC
So how is it done? What are the first steps? A good content writer should approach every project knowing their A, B and C: Architecture, Background and Content.

A is for Architecture
Architecture isn’t just about the site’s technological structure. It’s about words on pages. Before you do anything, you need to know how big your site has to be. You should talk to your writer about everything you feel needs including. From this, he or she will be able to help in drawing up the all-important sitemap of every proposed page on your site. Then you can decide if it needs trimming down or beefing up.

B is for Background
Background is the hardest part – it means work for you and those in your business. You’ve identified what pages are needed, now you need to identify which people in your organisation have the understanding and background detail to help the writer do their job.

Don’t make the mistake of sending your writer away with a pile of corporate brochures and the words, “Just cobble something together from the existing site”. That won’t be enough to ensure well-written, SEO-compliant pages – even the best web content writers in the business aren’t mind readers.

C is for Content
Content is the words your customers will read. This is when your hard work behind the scenes gets turned into pages that highlight your strengths, showcase your expertise and sell your goods and services. Or at least, that’s what should happen if you’ve developed a close collaborative partnership with your web content writer.

Never send your writer away to write in isolation. Encourage questions, have regular round-table progress discussions, ask to see how the writing is coming along – and contribute honest, constructive feedback. You’ll be surprised how much quicker (and more economical) the process becomes when approached like this.

And D is for…?
There is a D in this process: Design. Not just of the visual elements of your site, but also the technologies (if you need something bespoke) to make it work seamlessly. But it all starts with A. And that means getting an SEO web content writer on board from the beginning.

We all like to think we know how to write. But doing so for the web is a specialist skill. You wouldn’t try to program your site yourself – so why try to write it?

This article was written by Mark Owen from i do words.

See further information on Emarketeer’s web writing courses.

An interesting report published in June 2008 by Forrester entitled “Stop Managing Web Content” landed on my desk this week. It highlighted the importance of shifting from a website driven by your own content to one that supports the customer experience.

Its findings suggested that we have now moved beyond the “content is king” paradigm of the 90’s to providing more consumer-centric content on websites.

The report suggested that WCM doesn’t stand for web content management but instead “web content, community and customer experience management”.

The concept of a visitor finding and interacting with your website for content alone is becoming a thing of the past; instead visitors want to be engaged, inspired and if need be, connected with others. This has led to the dethroning of content as king in favour of social media sites and communities where UGC (user generated content) is king.

This shift has also been highlighted by Google as it places more and more importance on link equity created by backlinks within social media sites. And whilst we’re on the subject of search engine optimisation (SEO), we also know that UGC is a tool that digital marketers can use to increase content velocity and the potential for increased search bot activity and better overall search rank.

But aside from search engine optimisation, let’s go back to customer experience. The Forrester report found that 37% of IT decision makers consider customer experience to be the primary business driver for increasing the deployment of web content management systems.

So, in conclusion, there’s clearly a need to create the facility (from a content management system perspective) to build websites that support a compelling and contextually relevant customer experience, nurture online communities and increase overall engagement in order to improve conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

When running a search engine optimisation campaign, one the most important steps an SEO professional will recommend is to carry out keyphrase analysis in order to identify strategic and targeted keyphrases that will attract visitors to your product, service or brand.

Part of this step is to identify the target audience, i.e. the type of person likely to search for the keyphrases you have identified during planning.

In Steve Krug’s fantastic book, Don’t Make Me Think (which refers to usability rather than search engine optimisation), he claims that there is no stereotypical web user. And, he is right.

However, what we can do is to identify users in the research / buying / searching process as there are normally clear trends and user types that one can identify.

Dave Chaffey’s book Emarketing Excellence, demonstrates that searchers tend to fall into three categories – “explorers”, “hunters” and “trackers” – when searching. Let’s explore these further.

I’ll use a real life example here – me! I recently had a new kitchen installed and purchased all of my appliances online. Whilst searching for my new oven, I realised that I was exhibiting the explorer/hunter/tracker search behaviour precisely as Dave Chaffey had explained it.

Explorer
My initial research for an oven led me to carry out searches such as “built-in oven” or “integrated electric ovens”. At this stage I was researching and needed to establish the range of items for sale based on using relatively short tail keyphrases.

Websites with pages optimised for explorers will hone in on these kind of short tail keyphrases. Typical content could be buyer’s guides or blogs. Furthermore if the website content has clarity and good usability, these will perform best for explorers who tend to be impatient and click-happy.

Hunter
By the time I had figured out what kind of oven I wanted, I went on to carry out longer tail keyphrases such as “Bosch built-in electric oven ” adding qualifier keyphrases such as “stainless steel” to the mix. At this point I was a hunter as I knew the brand, type and colour of oven I wanted.

Websites optimised for slightly longer tail keyphrases, possibly within their product range or service overview pages, will tend to rank and hence perform best. Be sure to include all keyphrases variants and synonyms (carried out using demand analysis techniques at the keyphrase planning stage).

From a design perspective, websites with the strongest or most persuasive brands as well as the most engaging content will tend to capture hunters and convert them to trackers.

Tracker
After exploring and hunting for my oven, I was at the point when I knew exactly what model oven I wanted and simply needed to find the most trustworthy website or company offering my oven at the right price. At this stage I had become a tracker.

To attract trackers, websites need to focus on longer tail keyphrases such as product types or models; these keyphrases tend to be found in most abundance on product or service detail pages.

From a website design perspective, success with trackers comes down to prominent calls-to-action and persuasive design with good attention to detail on points-of-resolution during the checkout process.

I finally purchased my oven from a reputable etailer and so far haven’t had any problems!

See our related courses: Writing for the web and SEO training.

This article gives a quick overview of how the practice of user experience design is used to specify and design a website. It aims to address two key questions:

• What is the rationale for employing a User Centred Design approach to conceiving, designing and building websites?
• How do we get from raw inputs such as market research, demographics and business requirements to a fully fledged design?

What is User Experience?
User Experience involves building a model of users’ attitudes and behaviours to help us consider solutions that best fits their needs and expectations. The core aspects of it are a blend of design insight, usability and accessibility, psychology, technical knowledge and storytelling. We can better support users’ experiences by focusing on what they are trying to achieve and making it easier for them.

Benefits of a user centred approach to design
Successful business models such as Netflix and Flickr have been predicated on the notion of a user centred design process. They will tend to be focussed on enabling their users to be able to feedback frequently about what works and what doesn’t work for them. They will also work on incremental improvements to their websites, rather than large scale revamps.

This means they are able to respond quickly and effectively to their users’ needs, and build up a high degree of affinity for their brands.

Typical project phases
Large scale web design projects often run in three phases:

• Discovery (stakeholder interviews, user research, requirements gathering)
• Definition (persona creation, experience concepting)
• Design (design and build – site map, wireframing, functional specification etc.)

Discovery
This is the starting point for the User Experience team to understand the scope of the project. During this phase they seek buy in from key stakeholders. At the same time, business consultants and planners assess the scope of the project, sometimes producing a scope map and a road map which is used to determine what the project is intended to achieve.

Definition
The Definition phase is when user research outputs are absorbed and processed by the User Experience team. Personas are often created at this stage, enabling a distillation of user research learnings into a form more suited to Experience work. Visual design work typically takes place at the same time. Requirements captured during the Discovery phase are prioritised.

Design
Typical outputs from the design process are a site map, annotated wireframes, and a page and module catalogue. This is the most easily recognised and understood point of a project. Recommendations made during the Definition Phase are put into practice: wireframes and key screens are mocked up, user testing of different treatments may take place. Annotations may be added to the wireframes, in conjunction with page architecture, page descriptions the site map and process flows. Together these form a functional specification – a working document outlining the design and build requirements for the website.

Inputs (requirements gathering)

Market and user research
The User Experience team will absorb as much information about the business, its goals, any available user research, whether primary or secondary. In addition, any competitor reviews or analysis, brand reviews, and in the case of a pitch, the RFP (Request for Proposal). This material may come from a variety of sources; chief amongst these are user research and material supplied by the client.

• Primary research – bespoke research commissioned and conducted for the benefit of the project
• Secondary research – research which while valuable, is not tailored for the exact demands of the project

Mental models / card sorting
Great benefits can be gained from understanding how target users of a website think. We can build a mental model of how a user understands and thinks about the world. This can be very helpful when considering how to organise and group information (information architecture), what type of functionality should be used (interaction design) and the most appropriate language and signposting for content areas and features.

One way to achieve this is with a card sort. There are two types of card sort: open and closed. In an open card sort, users are asked to group website items with no predefined groups established. In a closed card sort, users are asked to place website items into predefined groups.

Processes (methodology)

Personas
These are fictionalised, composite characterisations typically derived as a result of primary user research. The qualitative aspects of research shine through here. One way to develop personas is to create behavioural axes – a series of sliding scales that range across a behaviour, attitude or activity exhibited by the sample set of users.
An example axis might have ‘money’ at one end and ‘love’ at the other. The axis might be called ‘life values’. Each user is mapped to the axis, and where clusters emerge, commonalities in behaviour can be perceived. These become the formative factors in a persona – the motivations and goals a user may exhibit.

To be useful, there is usually a limited number of personas, each focused around distinct goals and motivations. One of these is usually settled upon as being the primary persona, that is the one persona for whom if you were to design, you would fulfil the needs of all the other personas. For example a job site would attract jobseekers and vacancy posters.

User journeys
Once personas are established, user journeys can be created which focus on enabling the personas to complete tasks. Hence a successful user journey for the jobseeker would probably involve searching, refining selecting and applying for a vacancy.

Outputs (deliverables)

Taxonomy
Typical processes include the development of a taxonomy. The site taxonomy is generally developed in conjunction with the card sort, though input from stakeholders is typical in this process.

Page architecture
To facilitate the creation of layouts for individual web pages, it is useful to create a consistent rationale for where items will be located within each page. This is achieved through zoning, dividing the page into areas where the user can expect to consistently find certain types of content, navigation, features and functionality.

Scamps
These are rough layouts made to get an initial sense of how the pages might look.

Wireframes
These are more detailed layouts, ideally featuring real website content to facilitate the design process, as well as stakeholder feedback and any user testing.

Pages and modules (page module catalogue)
Typically websites consist of a series of linked pages. These pages have many areas of commonality between them. The areas that are the same or similar across pages can be understood as modules. For example, websites usually have a footer with the same set of links regardless of the page they appear on.

Prototypes and user testing
As the specifications for a site are developed, prototypes of certain user journeys are sometimes created for the purpose of user testing. These can be low fidelity, paper prototypes, which consist of scamps with some moveable and replaceable elements. These are great tools for rapid prototyping solutions to problems.

It is possible to produce higher fidelity prototypes which can present the actual experience of using a website in a much more compelling way with tools such as Visio, Axure, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash.

To test the value of a proposed design solution, sample users from the target audience are recruited to try to complete tasks with the prototypes.

This article is by Stephen Hellens, User Experience Architect at LBi, a leading London based digital agency.

Effective website design for web 2.0 generally results in interesting debate.

What is web 2.0?
Before discussing the ins and outs of web 2.0 website design, let’s remind ourselves what web 2.0 is about.
Web 2.0 is not officially a set of new online technologies, rather it is a trend of second generation web-based communities and hosted services that facilitate and promote social collaboration and sharing among its users. Such collaboration results in what is often termed user generated content (UGC).

Websites and/or services that fall under the web 2.0 phenomenon include social bookmarking sites, wikis, blogs and folksonomies, otherwise known as collaborative tagging and social tagging.

If you’ve used services such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Wikipedia and Technorati, you’re in the right area.

Technical differences
Where web 2.0 stands out from a technical viewpoint is in its architecture of participation which goes beyond the concept of open source software; it is the idea of opening up a mix of APIs and content production to all users and exposing data for re-use in what are termed “mash-ups”. The simplest example of this is site owner installing Google maps by directly tapping into the Google maps API.

It is often quoted that Ajax (asynchronous Javascript and XML) falls under the banner of web 2.0. Ajax is in fact more a by-product, as many web 2.0 sites use Ajax to improve GUI usability as it allows the display of additional “pages” without causing the HTML page to reload. This is ideal when carrying out typical web 2.0 related tasks such as uploading files or content.

O’Reilly make a nice comparison between how “web 1.0″ has evolved into web 2.0 with the following examples:

Web design considerations for Web 2.0:
Let’s not lose site of the original aim of this article: where does this leave web design in relation to web 2.0?

The most notable factors to take into consideration when designing for web 2.0 are as follows:

Simplicity
Whilst we always advocate simplicity when it comes to effective web design, the very nature of web 2.0 being more interactive and engaging requires simple design that creates a hierarchy between the visual and the functional elements of a page.

Allow for growth
Given that web 2.0 often refers to user generated content (UGC) in the form of blogs and wikis etc, be sure to allow your pages to grow gracefully whilst remaining digestible. Facebook is a classic example of this where users’ profiles can be packed full of UGC whilst still remaining relatively easy to read and understand.

Don’t forget Ajax
Given that Ajax and web 2.0 go hand in hand, ensure that you understand where Ajax can benefit your designs. When designing GUIs (graphical user interfaces) or pop-ups, consider Ajax over forcing a user to reload a page which can lose you usability points.

Adopt a column layout and consider your navigation
Many web designers adhere to a structured column layout such as the 3-column approach seen on many corporate websites. Some criticise this lack of invention, whereas others argue that web design has matured and these approaches clearly work from a persuasive perspective. I have to say I agree with the latter argument.

When it comes to web 2.0, you might want to consider separating site-wide navigation from functional navigation in separate columns. Equally your content should be separated yet again. Having clear demar ation zones aids usability and will result in higher user engagement levels.

Font sizes
With the advent of tag clouds, varying font sizes has become more prevalent among web 2.0 web designs. Tag clouds are a simple and obvious use of font size variations where the most popular links are bigger in size to the less popular ones. There is no reason why this approach cannot be adopted elsewhere providing it is carried out with care.
Consider the use of mixing serif and san serif fonts to convey a different personality among site-wide content. A good example of this (albeit not “web 1.0″) is the Times website.

Disseminate information
The use panels to display “chunks” of information is increasingly ubiquitous among web 2.0 designers. Not only does is it a useful mechanism for disseminating information, but it goes hand in hand with the technology where “includes” and “portlets” are published via 3rd party APIs or “mashups”.

Accessibility
Finally, let’s no forget accessibility. As is commonly known, accessibility and SEO go hand in hand, but so does good GUI design. Given that web 2.0 requires consideration for flexbile and growable amounts of content, functional components enabling users to add/edit content and technologies such as Ajax, design with your accessibility hat on so as not to alienate your audiences.

Whilst the majority of websites adhere to a fixed width layout, some web designers still maintain that liquid layouts tick many of the boxes presented in a creative or technical brief.

What is a liquid layout?
A liquid layout is an approach to web design using the full width of the browser window. The immediate benefit is noticeable among viewers with higher resolution monitors as there is a conspicuous lack of white space around the website. In contrast, fixed width websites can display a great deal of white space when viewing at larger resolutions.

In liquid layouts, the content stretches across the full width of the browser window; the by-product of this is that much more content is visible above the fold.

Who is using liquid layouts?
Given this, liquid layouts are often popular among etailers as they can display more items, promotions or just navigation in the viewable area above the fold, enabling them to engage more efficiently with their customers and either improve conversion rates or average order size.

Examples of websites adopting a liquid layout include: amazon.co.uk, dabs.com and maplin.co.uk.

Web design issues:

1. Design control
Mention liquid layouts to designers and they will generally express a preference for fixed layout since this approach will give them more control over the content height and width and hence general behaviour across difference resolutions. Fixed layouts are therefore still the preferred approach amongst most creative teams.

Bear in mind that liquid layouts will need to be functional at lower and higher resolutions to appeal to all audiences. There are some instances where liquid layouts at larger resolutions do not work as well – see smile.co.uk for example.

You may want to consider adopting an adaptive layout using CSS to adjust the position and behaviour of different screen elements depending on the viewable screen resolution.

2. Increased expenditure
There is no doubt that your HTML/CSS developers will need to spend more time getting liquid layouts right which will incur additional cost.

Furthermore, the design team and client will most likely have strong opinions on which parts of the screen should expand and which should remain fixed which means there may well be revisions across many templates.

Factor all of the above into your initial planning and estimating.

3. Test, test and test
Whilst every web project should undergo extensive testing including platform, browser, accessibility and usability testing, liquid layouts will add a new level of complication to all of these.

It may also reveal problems among content managed websites or ecommerce sites where content is dynamically generated, so again be prepared for additional testing and hence increased costs.

4. E-marketing
A designer following best practices should always wear his/her e-marketing hat, especially among ecommerce sites, where the focus will be on increasing conversion rates, up-take on promotions and basket or order sizes.
Whilst website design encompasses the visual element, persuasion-based design for commercial gain cannot be ignored.