Content Management - Strategies for Sustaining Interest from Visitors and Search Engines

Posted by Kevin McNally on 15 December 2009 | 0 Comments

While the Internet ultimately caters to everyday people, we are faced with the fact that websites must be creatively maintained in ways that address both its visitors and the search engines that deliver them. Every organization should have a clear strategy for building and sustaining website traffic and online relevance. Correctly applied, an effective content management system is a vital tool with which companies can determine their own fate amongst their constellation of online competitors.

The first thing visitors and search engines see when they come to your website, is your homepage. Visitors will immediately scan your page for calls to action, fresh content and various points of interest. Search engines will scan your homepage for properly formatted content, new information and links to the rest of your website. How much does your homepage represent your website as a whole? Does it automatically reflect any changes in the rest of your website?

How easy it is for you to make important changes to it? These are questions that any good CMS solution will help to resolve. While these two guests have different methods of "seeing" your homepage, they also have important shared interests. Chief amongst these is the importance of having "fresh" content on a regular basis. What good is adding a press release if visitors are forced to go to a separate press release page in order to see it listed? Why add a new product or services page if you've no clear way to announce it to the rest of the site?

When properly designed and implemented, your content management system (or CMS) represents an interconnected ecosystem where visitors can quickly navigate to all pages and homepage visitors are presented with the latest changes made to the most relevant areas of your site. With the right security features in place, different members of your organization can be put in charge of updating specific pages quickly and painlessly. Your organization is further aided by "content versioning", a CMS feature that, when available, "remembers" every edit you make, allowing you to quickly "roll back" to a previous version of your content or undo a recent error. 

Another important aspect of CMS that often escapes most users, is their level of support for metatags. Metatags represent extra information that users can add to their webpages in order to let search engines know what the content relates to. As users add new pages, they must remember to add "descriptions" and "keywords" to their metatag properties. Most CMS solutions allows users to make these edits, although depending on how this is implemented, these tags may not be updated or properly exposed to search engines. The more "unique" and "relevant" each page of content, the more search engines will pay attention to how interesting it is to incoming queries. One mistake websites often make, is to have the majority of its pages use the exact same metatag keywords. Sometimes the mistake is compounded by also repeating the same generic page title regardless of the content of a page. 

By putting these matters in the hands of an organization, this material can quickly and easily be kept up-to-date, changed at a moments notice, and reflect the most compelling call-to-action as determined by your sales group. Frequent website updates, convenient links, vibrant copy, accessibility, and being search engine friendly, are qualities that will continue to define the top performers in any market.