cmsXperts

With many search engine specialists agreeing that using a content management system to build your website can penalize its position in search results, webmasters need to take great care in choosing a CMS that allows for an effective search engine optimization without penalizing the ease of use of the tool.

Main SEO Issues of Content Management Systems

Some of the most often cited issues include:

• Bad META tags: not all CMS allow webmasters to edit the META tags for every single page or blog post being published, and many webmasters tend to simply ignore this, hoping they will get sorted automatically;
• Keyword poor URLs: on some systems, such as WordPress, webmasters can customize the format in which new page URLs are being displayed, for instance including the article title itself (which is generally a good practice). However, not every CMS does, forcing the site to use progressive numbering or other arbitrary fields instead;
• Dynamic URLs: search engine specialists agree that dynamic URLs don’t get indexed by Web spiders as fast as static URLs. For instance, a dynamic URL such as www.sample.com/page.php?id=32 usually tends to be less Google-friendly than www.sample.com/page32.php.
• Peruse of SPAN tags to set links and paragraphs styles, which tends to clutter the page code, making it slower to load and harder to parse for the spiders. More in general, CMS can use text in images, script or AJAX based navigation that can result almost impossible for Web spiders to index correctly and completely.

Best SEO Practices for CMS

When choosing your CMS, the main factors you should be looking at if what you care about the most is search engine optimization are:

• W3C-compliant code: a page that is coded to match W3C (X)HTML standards is a guarantee that it will be parsed by all search engine spiders correctly: while Google needs to be able to parse non-compliant pages as well, the Google homepage itself not respecting the standard, complying to the W3C directions ensures that even the smaller search engines, whose spiders aren’t quite as elaborate as Google’s, will have no particular problem indexing it;
• Text-based navigational links: Flash or other complicated navigational links are, again, hard to understand for the Web spider. When image-based, the CMS should allow you to set the ALT tag, which you should fill with a descriptive text;
• URL customization capabilities: as explained before, it’s important to be able to set static, keyword-rich titles for your pages. Some experts also suggest that the lower your pages reside in your site hierarchy, the more their importance tends to be discounted by search engines: for this reason, it might be a good practice to be able to publish your pages all under the same directory;
• Reducing of code clutter: the CMS should use cascading style sheets as much as possible and avoid peruse of SPAN tags, which will speed up the page load speed considerably. JavaScript code should also be contained into separate files rather than in the page itself, to allow for a better code caching.

Some experts will say that the best SEO practice for CMS is simply making sure you’re not using one. However, it would seem that content management systems are now gradually shifting towards a better and better search engine optimization, also thanks to third-party tools.

For webmasters using WordPress, the recently released “All in One SEO Pack” is certainly a big step forward in this direction, taking care of automatic title and META tags optimization and avoiding some of the duplicate content to be found on WordPress blogs.

For all those familiar with the dynamics of affiliate marketing, Clickbank plays a major role in terms of revenue potential and range of products to sell, with commissions going up to 75% of the product price.

With such high commissions, earnings for a site with a good amount of traffic can be significant. However, one big limitation is imposed by the fact that sellers rarely provide you, the affiliate, with the right tools that could lead you to market their products effectively.

Many webmasters solve this problem by simply placing a standard text link or an image taken from the sales pitch page of the product. However, results are rarely satisfactory because they are statically generated and therefore can’t adapt to the content of each and every single one of your pages.

Luckily, there is now a solution: you can now put contextual Clickbank ads in your site and see them dynamically adapt to the currently displayed content, in the same way Google AdSense works. At the time of this writing, there are mainly three different implementations of contextual Clickbank ads.

ClickbankContextualScript.com

The first implementation is the one you can find at their homepage. In order to use the script you will need to pay a one-time fee of $47, which is by no means a prohibitive price, but makes this product worth buying only if your site is already somewhat popular or if you feel comfortable that the script will quickly make that money back.

The site contains a demo section that gives you a good feel for what the registered version allows you to do: you can choose among different ad formats and change the color scheme optimizing it for your site. There is a sample ad group in the site homepage and, as you can see, the resemblance with Google AdSense is quite obvious.

This particular script periodically downloads the XML feed of the available Clickbank products, parses the current webpage text and tries to find the closest matches by searching the database for selected keywords. Should you consider the contextual matching algorithm too weak, you can also choose to manually input a series of keywords and have the script search for them, which also speeds up the ad loading process considerably.

MyClickBankAds.com

MyClickbankAds sample ad formats

This second implementation of a contextual Clickbank script is more suited to sites with a smaller amount of traffic, or on which you’d like to monitor the user reaction before deciding to buy a similar product. The service is called My Clickbank Ads and is completely free to setup and use, even featuring its own stats tool. What’s the catch, you might ask? They require that 25% of the ads display their own affiliate ID, in order to earn enough to further develop the script.

Similarly to the one described before, here too you can customize both ad size and color scheme to adapt it to your site: you can even choose to automatically display an image fetched from the site of the seller, but the current implementation of this function usually leads to awkward results, so plain text ads might be the best solution here too.

Again, their ads format closely resemble those of Google AdSense, this time with the additional feature of URL cloaking in order to prevent your affiliate ID to be seen, which is certainly useful to increment your profits.

CBproADS.com

Possibly the most popular among contextual Clickbank scripts (also because of their massive advertisement campaigns), CBproAds is yet another interesting tool for this kind of affiliate advertisement.

The site homepage defines the service as “partially free”: in fact, although you can setup and start earning from it without having to pay anything at all, in order to access the full set of features you need to become a registered member by paying a recurring fee.

CBproADS samples

The script features are very similar to those of the first two scripts, although their Clickbank database is beign updated daily and the content-matching algorithm is probably the best one: they also offer several ad formats, some of which don’t necessarily resemble Google AdSense banners.

A Final Word

When you consider installing these scripts, do keep in mind that the current Google AdSense policy explicitly forbids the use of a contextual ads script together with their banners, so you will have to choose between the two, which means that, in order to be profitable, the script of your choice will have to outperform both static Clickbank banners and any Google AdSense banners that you might have published on your site.

What about performance? The “My Clickbank Ads” homepage displays real time statistics from their members performance: a number of almost ten thousands users have displayed a total of 300,000+ ads, with a click-thru rate of about 0.50%. Whether this is a positive or a negative data should be up to you, once you figure out what is your current performance using static Clickbank ads.

To sum up, contextual Clickbank ads are certainly an interesting solution to try that doesn’t take much time in the setup and has a good potential of increasing your affiliate sales: however, because they require an initial investment and they exclude the possibility to use some of the best performing ad programs on the market, they may not be suitable for every website.

If you are going to use WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS) for your Web site, or you just need a fresh new look for your blog, then there’s a few things you might want to check for before choosing your theme.

Your new theme can have an impact on your visitors experience, search engine ranking, link building and marketing.

Here is checklist of 10 important elements you want to look for to make sure your new theme is utilizing all the functions in Wordpress, and is SEO ready.

It is by no means a secret that, in the past few years, Google has almost monopolized the online advertising industry, which also constitute the main source of income for the Montain View giant.

Clearly, there is a lot of money to be made from Adsense ads, provided that you know how to draw and retain a large amount of visitors to your website. But if attracting visitors and making your site engine friendly is somewhat a science with well-defined rules to follow and relatively certain results, that of strategically placing ads in the right spot to maximize your revenue is really more of an art that takes a lot of time and practise to master.

Choosing the right ad format

Google lets you choose among a wide variety of ad formats, which you can place pretty much anywhere in the layout of your page with a limit of three groups per page. One of the most common is the ’skyscraper’ format, which you typically want to place in your sidebar; other widely used formats are the small 125×125 pixels and many other different formats of horizontal banners that you can put in the header or footer of your pages.

According to Phoebe Ho, the “Optimizing Extraordinaire” for the Google AdSense team, the best performing format of all is statistically the so-called “large rectangle”, 336×280 pixels in size, and the wider formats generally tend to outperform the narrow and smaller ones.

Color scheme: blending vs contrast

Linux.com screenshot

When it comes to choosing the right colors to customize the ads, there are essentially two main schools of thought. The first common solution is bleding the ads with the rest of the site, as to emphasize the fact that they are part of the site content and add value to the site; the second solution goes in the opposite direction and aims at making them as easy to detect as possible.

Note that one of these two “schools of thought” does not necessarily exclude the other, but the two are rather complementary. You can see a good example of how both techniques are being applied effectively on the very same page at the Linux.com homepage: notice how the rotating banners in the header are most of the times in contrast with the bluish background, and how that makes them very easy to notice. On the other hand, the ads at the bottom of the page — and, from time to time, even those at the top right hand corner — are easier on the eyes and use the same color scheme as the rest of the site.

How much will I make per click?

While there is no way of directly determining how much you will make from every single click, there is a lot you can do to make sure you will at least tend to display the highest paying ads on your site, especially if you are creating a website from scratch.

In fact, Google provides AdWords clients you with a tool that ends up being extremely useful to AdSense users too. The tool is simply named “Keyword Tool”, and can be found at this address.

Complete the form by writing a few keywords, maybe the ones your site is optimized for, and you will be presented with a list of similar keywords, each with its advertiser competition (which, since AdWords is essentially an auction, is proportional to the click value for that particular keyword) and search volume during the previous month.

As you might have already figured out, a good index for the potential revenue of a keyword is the product of these two factors. Try and experiment new keywords, and you might find out that optimizing for one keyword instead of another could bring you five times as much revenue with very little effort.

Finding the right spot

Finding the right place for your ad is possibly the single most important factor of all: the casual reader might see poorly positioned ads like a webmaster’s greedy attempt at making money without regards to content, and if this is the case, you will see your visitors exiting your site as fast as they came in.

An extreme example of ad placement...

Many webmasters will simply place their ads in the sidebar, and this is generally a good solution. Others — including many highly ranked news sites — will use them to break an article into smaller chunks: although effective, this technique can be even disappointing for the reader, especially if the ‘chunks’ are very small and the ads take most of the page.

What you want to look for when deciding where to put your ads is a spot that is highly visible, but that at the same time gives the reader the impression they can easily ignore them to focus on the content if they wish to do so.

Consider for instance using a sidebar with a double column layout, the external one providing the usual navigational links, and the second, internal one containing ads in a narrow skyscraper format: the visitor’s eyes will have to cross the ads section twice (back and forth) every time they want to navigate your site, but they will also be able to focus on the content whenever they wish to do so, thus having a better user experience and browsing your site more and more.

Putting it all together

That you believe it or not, by reading this article you already know all you need to know to successfully use AdSense on your site. What you may lack now is time and practise to experiment new solutions and see what works for your site depending on your layout, color scheme, niche, format, and so on.

Try to experiment different solutions for an extended period of time until you find the setup that works best for you, and remember that positioning your ads correctly is a delicate kind of art — even the tiniest, meaningless particular can have huge repercussions on your results.

You can find out more about optimizing Google ads for your website by reading the “Adsense Webinar“. It contains a number of real life examples from AdSense users and many tips from expert web designers and Google employees.

As you well understand having a website is great, but having a website which has up to date information and newly added content is even better.

There are number of different ways to change and update the content on a website. In this article I will go over the different options so that you will better be able to find the correct solution for your budget.

1. Webmaster
The first way to manage, update, change or create new content for a website is to have a dedicated webmaster working as an internal employee for your organization. This webmaster must have a working knowledge of such technologies as HTML, CSS, FTP, Graphic Design and other basic web development and web design methodologies. The webmaster would serve as the primary vehicle through which updates and modifications would be made to the website, through the utilization of professional web development protocol.

Pro
100% flexibility and stabilizability. With a full time webmaster, you may add, change or create any part of your website at anytime you please and you may change to look feel and function any way you want. You have 100% flexibility to add and change the website with absolutely no restrictions but the skill set and capabilities of your webmaster.

Con
Cost - to hire a full time web professional you must have enough updates and changes to the website to justify the salary of a full or part time employee.

2. Third Party Service Provider
This is a commonly used scenario for many organizations who do not have the need for a full or part time webmaster. In this scenario your organization would contract with a third party service provider - often the same company who built the website in the first place. When your organization needs updates or changes to the website, you would email or call the service provider who would implement those changes to the website. In this scenario there are two major fee structures:

1. Hourly
In the hourly fee structure the service provider performs the updates to the website and bills your organization based on the time it took to implement the changes. This is a good scenario for organizations who have non predictable changes that don’t occur in a regularly scheduled or predictable manner.

2. Contract
The contract fee scenario is best for situations where you organization will have regularly scheduled changes to the website such as monthly or weekly specials, promotions, events or constantly changing job postings. Since the workload is the same for every content change the service provider can quote a monthly contract price to make the changes to the site. This scenario is best for companies who have no full or part time webmaster and who are unwilling or unable to invest in the up front cost of the development of a content management system for their website.

3. Content Management System
Content Management Systems (CMS) are becoming more and more popular these days as organizations realize the benefit of having an up to date, dynamic and alive web presence. CMS allows non-technical employees of your organization to make changes to the website without having to understand professional web development protocols such as HTML, CSS, FTP or graphic design.

Through this option the web development agency who designs the website, builds into the site specific pieces of functionality and usability that allow non-technical content providers to serve as webmasters; updating, changing, modifying and adding content.

There are two major kinds of CMS:
1. Database Driven Control Panels
2. Software Based Contributions

Database CMS Approach
In the Database Model approach, an advanced CMS method, the web developer will build custom data structures to hold and store the web content, which is set up to automatically publish the content to the website. The non-technical content contributor would utilize user friendly forms to input the data which would then be stored in the database and automatically served up on the web page.

For example: For an news page, the web site content contributor would login into the Control Panel and fill out a form with data fields such as “News Item Title” “News Item Date” “News Item Description” etc. Then click “SAVE” that piece of content would then be stored in a database and automatically published onto the website with no further action required by the content contributor.

Pro
Anyone can modify the website, anyone who knows basic computing can login in and modify or change content. Low ongoing cost compared to hiring a 3rd party service provider at hourly or contract rates.

Con
Unnecessary cost for organizations with little or infrequent website changes. Large upfront and/or ongoing cost for advanced CMS for database and advanced server costs. Updateable pieces of the website are hard coded, so all updateable items much be identified at the outset of the development. Slightly more rigid options for updating content versus the Software Method.

Software CMS Approach
In the Software Based CMS method the web development agency builds the website using a specific methodology that will allow the website to work with specialized web design software. The software is comprised of basic word editing and layout tools similar to Microsoft Word, but has the capability of connecting directly to a web page and allowing the user to make changes to the website. This method eliminates the need for content contributors to have advanced web development proficiencies in HTML, CSS, FTP and Graphic Design by enabling them to utilize a simple and basic graphical user interface.

Pro
Anyone who knows how to use Microsoft Word can make modifications to the website. Low ongoing cost compared to hiring a 3rd party service provider at hourly or contract rates. Low upfront and ongoing cost compared to the Database CMS Model. Great flexibility, non-technical content contributor can operate with great freedom to make changes to the website.

Con
Small learning curve necessary for software. Lack of heavy constraints used in Database method gives user the freedom, but can result in non standardized web formatting and jumbled content structures.

In Conclusion
Regardless of which method you use to change and modify the content of your website, the most important thing is that you are keeping the content on your site fresh and alive.

In todays market of sophisticated web users, it is easy to sniff out stale and dusty content on websites that have not been changed in years. The ability of your website to remain alive, active, dynamic and constantly refreshing is a major contributing factor to your organizations ability to remain competitive online.

For more information about Content Management Systems and how they can help improve your web presence please contact us and we will set up a time to further educate you on the benefits and opportunities of CMS.