Maya Mendoza answers:

You are talking about CMS premade web site systems. These templates are not made for SEO optimization friendliness. They often use a database factor and paramenters that do not do well with rankings, though they can be indexed. They do not offer proper page names, meta tags and so much more. I have had many clients with CMS sites who had many issues and problems as far as ranking, and we developed secondary informational web sites and blogs to help draw traffic.

CMS are wonderful sites for huge ecommerce, but again, there are major issues on the seo side.

Search engine optimization is not rocket science, but it is complex and it is an ongoing process that changes almost daily. There is no such thing as a permanent “fix” to magically send you to the top of the rankings for good. But here are some of the basics to look for when optimizing your site for the first time. There are some real simple things you can ask if they provided. FTp access to web site, not control panel, naming html pages with keywords, static html pages, use of xml sitemaps in root directory, use of h tags, different title and description tags for all pages, static text links, embedded text links and so on.

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

The fundamental concepts behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are understood by most search engine marketers, but those new to the subject should find this article to be very useful. Informative articles on various aspects of SEO have been published here on MarketPosition.com over the years, and in this post I will summarize these concepts and provide links to relevant articles.

Keyword Research
The first step in SEO is to identify the search terms for which you would like your web site to rank well on search engines. We might believe that we know these terms already, but our intuition is often incorrect about how popular or competitive search keywords actually are in reality. People use all kinds of variations of phrases as they are searching for information on the internet. It’s important to identify these terms and use them in your site content exactly as people type them into search engines. To discover what these search terms are, a keyword research tool should be used. There are several free tools available, but most of the robust keyword research tools are subscription based.

Web Site Optimization
You now have your well researched keyword list in hand, and are ready to use the keywords in your web site content. How should these search terms be integrated into your web pages? How often should the phrases be used, and in what sections of the pages? Those are excellent questions and the answers are not known exactly because they depend on the algorithms used by search engines. However, it is generally agreed upon that search engines look at several different sections of a page when evaluating its content:

Title tag
Heading tag
Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags
Text within the Body area
Link text and Link URL
ALT attribute for Image tags (the ALT tag may be less significant than other areas of the page)

Search engines look at the various sections of the document for repeating patterns of keywords or phrases. For this reason, it’s important to have a keyword density within a specific range.

Web Site Design
Aesthetics and user friendliness are important elements of web site design, but there are a number of other things to consider to ensure a web site will be as friendly to search engines as possible.

HTML Validation
It’s important to ensure that the HTML code that makes up a web page is correctly formatted. If there are errors in the code, then search engine spiders may have difficulty indexing the page’s content. Use a HTML Validator to check the formatting of HTML code,

Site Map
It’s always a good idea to create a site map to make it easy for search engine spiders to index the site’s content. Link to every page on the web site that has relevant content, and place a link to the site map on the site’s home page. It may also help to sign up for the Google Sitemaps program to help ensure your content is indexed by Google.

Develop a Site Theme
One aspect of web site design that is often overlooked is theme development. If possible, organize your content so that particular themes are reinforced. Read Reinforcing Ideas and Improving Relevance to Gain Better Rankings for ideas to consider when organizing your site content.

Avoid Duplicate Content
It’s important to avoid duplicating content on the web site.

Comply with Search Engines’ Terms of Service
There are several practices to avoid to stay on good terms with search engines. Techniques like cloaking, hidden text, or spamming, for example, violate search engines’ terms of service. If a site is found to be using these types of blackhat techniques, it will typically be removed from the search engine’s index.

Build Link Popularity
The Link Popularity of a page is a term that refers to the number of other web sites that link to that page. Search engines typically consider how many other sites link to a page as a factor in determining that page’s ranking. The idea behind this is that if others link to a page, then they must consider that page’s content to be valuable in some way. However, all links are not weighted equally and it’s therefore important to try to encourage high quality web sites within your own theme area to link to your site.

Monitor Performance
Once your optimized web site is online, you’ll want to monitor its performance on the search engines. If the site is brand new, it should of course be submitted to the search engines, or perhaps resubmitted if necessary. Monitor the site’s positions on search engines for keywords of interest to identify areas where the site is performing well and areas that can be improved.

A web site that is positioned well in search engines should start receiving a significant number of visitors. To monitor traffic and other useful web site statistics, a web analytics solution such as WebTrends is recommended.

Conclusion
The art of SEO is a set of skills that can be learned and implemented by anybody who manages a web site. However, proper optimization and maintenance of the site requires time and effort, and the fundamental elements of SEO discussed above must be put into practice. Those who find they do not have the time or desire to implement their own SEO program, then hire an SEO Expert who incorporates all of the steps above.

Maya Mendoza answers:

Pinging is a good way to alert search engines as soon as you have created a new post, it can lead to quicker indexing.

As for blog commenting, I find it to be a VERY good technique not only for SEO, but also in terms of gaining targeted traffic to your website. Nowadays many new internet marketing sites comment on other sites in their niche and begin traffic building through that – as long as your comments provide good insight you will get traffic – dofollow blogs only really contribute to your links.

Maya Mendoza answers:

My website was #1 for the keyword “home business” for about 3 or so years — until Google changed its algorithm and now gives emphasis on the keywords in the domain name. Search for “home business” and the top are those sites with those keywords (my site now fluctuates between #5-10)

But in the new pages we create, we have changed our naming conventions and now our URLs contain the tite of the article such as business-tips-entrepreneurs.htm

Title is critical. We take a long time tweaking the meta title of the page. It has to have the right keywords

Content is key, however. We make sure we write good quality articles. It is easy to get links and other people will link to you without you begging for them to do it if your content is good

We used to let others use our articles, but with duplicate content penalty, we don’t do article submissions anymore.

The key is to make sure that every single page can stand to compete with other pages. So you can get traffic to your homepage, and all your inside content pages. We don’t rely on one keyword — e.g. “home business” — as we have lots and lots of keywords where we are #1.

Make sure your site ranks in LOTS and LOTS of keywords, even longtail ones, and don’t rely on a handful of keywords. 100 visitors from 100 keywords is much better than 1000 visitors from 2 keywords