3. SEO in your CMS

“WP: Pay close attention to what you want crawled and indexed, and send clear signals on those pages. For example, rarely if ever do you want tag pages indexed. Tools like Yoast & Rank Math can help you control indexation through meta robots, canonicals, etc. Be careful not to accidentally “introduce” new page and asset types you don’t want indexed to Google – by including them on XML sitemaps. This happens – frequently! – when you set up new SEO plugins and forget to configure the default settings. Big picture, never forget that these wonderful plugins are really “tools”. Tools you can use wisely… or accidentally harm yours site. A tool is not a strategy. Rather, pick the right tool for the job, and leverage it correctly to help implement your game plan! Also: make sure to select a solid redirect plugin, like Simple 301 Redirects or Redirection (double-check that it works with your hosting provider- they don’t all.) Having the ability to implement simple pattern matching or regex-formatted redirects is a huge win!”

“Regardless of which CMS you use, I think it’s worth it for any SEO to make sure they understand how the CMS structures content and thus what URLs they create. For example, with WordPress, users may not realize that their implementation is creating separate URLs for authors, month & years post archives, and media attachments. On Shopify, you may end up having multiple versions of one product page because of all the Collection versions as well. This can eat up crawl budget and water down your share of unique content.”

“Read the documentation. Every CMS has very lengthy documentation that talks about how it works, why it works, and so on. More often than not, they have some very specific SEO considerations. You want to understand how they handle metadata. You want to make sure that you have the capability to edit page titles, meta descriptions, structured data, and all types of other metadata. You want to make sure that it allows you to do 301 redirects. There is always going to be a use case for changing where a piece of content lives. And then internal links. You need to have the capability to add internal links between pages. In some cases, the CMS doesn’t allow you to add HTML. They are only WYSIWYG environments. Not sure why that exists or why that’s a thing. But you need to know that the CMS has the capability. “

“For WordPress, it’s critical to interrogate all of your settings. A good SEO plugin will take care of the back-end, sure! But then you need to assess every single public URL you have. Similar tags? Consolidate them. Attachment pages? Redirect them. Thin archives? Populate them! If you want to go deeper, you need to interrogate *everything* your site’s doing – beyond just your SEO settings! Plugins slowing you down? Replace them! Comment spam? Protect against it! Links broken? Monitor them! SEO plugins provide tools, but you still need to think + manage.”

“Create templates for your team to use that are set up for SEO success. Making SEO easy to use/implement increases the odds that your team will give a damn about SEO. Bonus points if you also create documentation explaining how and when to use said templates.”

“- Define your web architecture before choosing your CMS. The topic and the main keyword / keywords you are going to work on each page.

– On a WP / wocommerce before creating the products and categories, define and write the permalinks for your online store based on your strategy.

-If you are starting an e-commerce with WP, define the categories and subcategories from the beginning, and which product goes in each one. Keep in mind how to organize the products that are in more than one or if you don’t want this to happen. “

“For Wix you can customize the out-of the-box-markup they add at the page type level and use their dev tool Velo to custom set structured data on any page.”

“WordPress users: Implementing dynamic schema markup can be fairly easy once you dig through WordPress codex and learn how you can leverage it to automatically pull information from pages and posts.”

“Try to avoid using free themes as they may inject unexpected links or code that you did not realise you were accepting when you installed that free theme. Compensate the designer FAIRLY for their design and pay for your themes.”

“Blindly installing plugins can do more harm than good. Buying a Swiss Army Knife doesn’t make sense if you only need a tiny scissor to cut a piece of a paper. Tip: Evaluate plugins thoroughly before installing. If possible, involve a dev too.”

“Define your requirements for the theme and if you are purchasing the finished one, make sure it fits to your needs. Sometimes adapting templates and changing page layouts of finished theme can itself cause a lot of technical SEO problems with loading, crawling or indexing. Define what modules and SEO widgets do you need based on the website architecture, type of the website and issues you want to avoid. Research best rated modules and test first before you apply it site-wide, to make sure it works with your template and does not cause any issues.”

“Yoast (for WP) has the ability to edit your robots.txt. Of course you can do it manually but if you’ve already invested in one plugin, use it to its full potential. Why? Include your sitemap URL(s) in the robots.txt.”

“For WordPress: Make the most out of the Gutenberg Editor. There are many modules that allow to create content that are thought to facilitate the reading experience, giving an opportunity to improve the relevance. One of my favorites is the option to add an initial menu with anchor links allowing you to distribute and establish a hierarchy to the different sub-topics (with different Hs), offering users to go where they really need to.”

“1. Make a diagram(.net) of info you want to convey. What problem(s) can you solve? 2. Organize by category/service. 3. Use diagram to plan your content type / internal links / cornerstone posts / pages. 5. Do Deep Research. 6. Create. 7. KW & Tech Optimize. 8. Track & Improve.”