One of the major offerings from Garrett Development is our brand of a Content Management System (CMS).  Our CMS system, like most others available today, provide a variety of tools that allow the website owner to add, edit and delete content for their website on their own.

Most people who work with search engine optimization will tell you that content is generally considered a good (really good) thing.  After all, isn't finding information what the Internet is supposed to be used for?  Information can sometimes be found in images and sound on-line, but for most users the key is the written word.

For this reason, search engines like text - lots of text.  In fact, some search engines will not even index a page with less than a certain number of words on it - so its better to ramble on a bit (never been a problem for me).

Therefore, I generally start by determining what pages a customer will need in his or her website and optimizing those pages based on what is supposed to go in them.  For instance, if I have a customer that specializes in providing accounting services for small businesses in the Kansas City area, I will build a Dynamic CMS page (or pages) specifically optimized for the various key words the customer is marketing for.  

From this point, I will actually place the first round of content in the CMS system for the client (if it is available) and optimize the text and keywords at that point.  If the customer ends up adding text and images at a later time because of various changes in their business model for instance, at least the base keywords are in place for the overall topic.

But how do we optimize dynamic content that was written by the end user for the Search Engines?  By this I mean how do we make sure that the end user is using keywords in the correct places and not creating broken links and placing alt text on images?  Well, we can't. 

We can, however, create a CMS system that automatically optimizes the various <meta> elements at our disposal.

ASP.Net has a rich set of tools available for pragmatically (and declaratively) managing the various meta tags in our web portals.  I found an excellent article from DotNet-Friends.com describing how to pragmatically alter the entire Header of an ASP.Net page.  Using these types of techniques will generate more search engine friendly pages.

This article for instance takes advantage of these techniques.  Notice that the title of the page in the browser tab has been automatically changed to be the title of the article with the name of the website appended to it.  

In the end, if you are planning on deploying a content management system for your organization, be sure that it provides some mechanism for optimizing the content you write for the search engines.  Be sure to place a lot of valuable text within each article that you write or page that you create.  Pay close attention to the words, synonyms and phrases that you use and be diligent in adding new content on a regular basis.

Search engines like content - and they like content that is not stagnant.  Be sure that the information on your key pages is updated on a regular basis, but try to keep the topic and theme of the content consistent.

By using these techniques, you will create a website that is easily indexed by the major search engines and will drive more traffic to your site.  This will in turn increase your online presence and generate more customers.