SEO and Document Headings

Page structure is an important component of optimizing your website for better search engine rankings. Each page should have document headings that are both user and SEO friendly. Properly organizing your information for a search engine optimization campaign is supported by our content management system with some key customizations. The PLONE content management system, by default, isn't exactly an SEO Friendly CMS in terms of a very detailed oriented search engine campaign. However, PLONE is powerful and highly customizable, and by taking advantage of the application server flexibility, we worked through the default code in order to generate analysis results that are hand code quality.

Search Engine Friendly CMS Changes

As with most content management systems, there are tags and additional code that are not displayed in your browser, meaning that you don't know its there, until you review the source code. A very important step, since that's all the search engines read. We're talking about document heading tags, the HTML organization of your webpage content. By looking at the source code, or even easier, using an analysis tool, on a default PLONE instance, what you will find is that the CMS uses H5 tags for a few of its built-in features. These typically appear in the beginning of the HTML document, which immediately throws off the organizational structure of your web page's information. Not quite an optimization goal.

Headings are used by search engines to learn about the topic of the page content, along with the content itself. Your document should be well organized using headings, equally important as quality content, keyword densities and meta data. Its all related and the higher quality of information, better organization and availability, the more successful your SEO campaign will be.

SEO Friendly Headings

We removed all H tags that were not part of the document body. The only document headings that can be found are the ones that were intended to be there by the content administrators. This gave us the control back over the source code. By default there is an H1 tag that isn't visible, that appears in the top of the BODY tag. This isn't good for two reasons, first and foremost, any hidden text could be considered spam by a search engine. Secondly, there should only be one H1 tag, per document. Underneath this are H5 tags that the content management system uses for its own features or tools. Not really something we cared to understand, just something we knew had to be changed in order to deploy a true search engine friendly CMS.

Default CMS Page Analysis

Here is a sample view of a default PLONE CMS webpage. By simply loading the webpage in your browser, by eye, you can see a single document heading. It reads "What is a CMS?", the topic of the document and an H1 tag. This page was selected as a sample to demonstrate one of the differences between the default instance of the CMS and the search engine friendly features of an SEO Content Management System deployment. This page is fine for a human visitor, but what does a robot see?

Click for Larger Image

Now we can analyze this page using the power tools and what we find in the source code is 5 heading tags. Only 1 is visible in the browser. So this page could appear to be a well structured document to a visitor, however a search engine will read the source code and attempt to determine what the page is about. Below is a snippet of the report rendered from the analysis tool.

The final H1 tag shown in the report is the one you can see. The others utilize a stylesheet class that isn't visible in your browser. This needed to change to be used in search engine optimization campaigns. The PLONE content management system is a great platform and we have performed many customizations, like the document headings, in order to offer a unique search engine friendly CMS.