Article Surfing Archive

As the ecommerce world wakes up to the importance of content management systems, the programmers are building easier to use, and more powerful CMSs to handle the demand. Some of the most powerful are free, like Drupal.

Free content management systems do work well, but free doesn't mean easy. A good programmer can build a content management system for under $2 000.00. Once built, the CMS is placed in the hands of the business owner, and this is where the problems start.

Titles

The title is the most important part of the article. It needs to contain the meta keyword phrase, but also tell the user what they will read about. Generic titles fail in several ways. First, they do not attract readers. Second, they are overlooked by search engine robots. Third, they do not increase the page's rank. Fourth, they rarely match the meta information.

Cute titles may catch the reader's attention, but they do not attract search engines who look for the < title > code and uses the information to categorize the content and retrieve it when a visitor does a search.

X-plosive Method to Xpand Sales

The above title has several problems. The cute title may be eye catching, but it is difficult to read. Also, it means nothing to search engines who will categorize the article using the words 'method' and 'sales.'

The above example does not really tell readers what they will learn, or how to solve their problems. This forces people to read the article to find out what it is about, very few people do this, most click away.

A better title might be: Five Strategies to Increase Sales

This uses words 'real' people may use to learn how to increase their sales. The search engine will now use the words 'five,' 'strategies,' 'increase,' 'sales.'

Meta Information

All content management systems have a section on every page for meta tag information. This usually includes a description, short description, keywords, and copyright. Many CMS managers use the first, introduction - summary - paragraph as the description. The one line description is a keyword heavy explanation of the article, including any problems it may solve for the reader.

Look at the two article examples given above. It will be difficult to convince search engines that the article is about more than 'method' and 'sales.' However, duplicating the four keywords in the title in all three sections of the meta content (as well as the article content) will tell the search engines that the article really does discuss Five Strategies to Increase Sales.

Headings

The #1 overlooked SEO tool is heading titles. Most webmasters do not understand how important a heading title is. First, search engines consider them more important than meta information. An article that discusses Five Strategies to Increase Sales, with four heading titles: Strategy #1 - Sales Communication Basics; Strategy #2 - Increase Exposure; Strategy #3 - Five Step System to Sales Success; Strategy #5 - Increase Profits through Sale's Aids.

This article now has six titles, each given importance based on their HTML code: , , , , etc.

In many cases inexperienced webmasters will not use heading titles because they do not like the size difference. Size does not matter. Search engines do not care about font size. Change the font size to match the rest of the article, just leave the heading title there.

Heading titles also break up the article making it 'skimmable.' It is common knowledge among SEO experts that articles which can be easily skimmed keep people on the page a little longer, and keep the page's visitor reading down the page - increasing the chances of attracting them and making a sale.