SEO - Search Engine Optimization
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It is a technique or process to improve the ranking of your content on major search engines. Over the past several years, SEO has become a discipline in its own right and is a critical tool used by the best web marketers. SEO is important because it increases the likelihood that someone will find your content on the internet and therefore increases the chances of monetizing your content via subscriptions, advertisements, syndication or some other form. You could have the best looking site in the world but if no one can find it, what’s the point?
Unlike other content management systems on the market like Drupal, Joomla, dotNetNuke and many others, Lotus CMS was specifically designed to give content owners maximum flexibility in controlling the level of SEO on a site. These highly valuable features include:
Title Tag Customization & Rules
A search-engine friendly CMS must allow for title tags to not only be customized on a page-specific level, but also enable rules for particular sections of a website. For example, rules can be setup to put a different title on pages related to a blog, a different title for forums, or different titles for static or category-specific pages.
Static, Keyword-Rich URLs (“SEO-Friendly URLs”)
URLs have historically been the most problematic SEO issue for CMS platforms. Search-friendly content management systems should feature custom URL creation and also allow multiple URLs to point to the same content. This extreme level of flexibility can be used to create an unlimited number of URL's for the same content, or, URL's specifically generated to contain optimized keywords.
Meta Tag Customization
The meta description and robots tags are two critical customization options that are useful not only for SEO activities but for also enabling complex taxonomies. Allowing content editors to control meta-tags is an essential ingredient in managing large amounts of content. Lotus allows users to manage meta tags at the page-level.
Enabling Custom HTML Tags
A good CMS has to offer extra functionality on HTML tags for things like "nofollow" on links, or <hx> tags for headlines and subheadlines. These can be built-in features accessible through menu options, or the CMS can simply allow a manual editing of HTML in the text editor window when required.
Internal Anchor Text Flexibility
Being search-friendly is one-factor, but being optimized is another. Lotus allows users to customize the anchor text on internal links. Rather than simply making all links in a site's architecture the page's title, Lotus is flexible enough to handle custom input from editors regarding the anchor text of category-level or global navigation links.
Intelligent Categorization Structure
Many content management systems enforce a category structure into which the content must be fit. Poor category structure can have long-lasting effects. When designing an information architecture for a website, Lotus places no limits on how pages are accessed or how they are categories. A built-in menu widget offers fully customizable navigation panels and supports a wide range of navigation flows.
Pagination Controls
Lotus allows editors to control pagination through careful use of nofollows and meta noindex tags as well as based on the number of lines of content within each widget, if so desired. This feature provides site owners full control over important content to ensure maximum link saturation and crawlability.
301-Redirect Functionality
A surprising number of CMS in the market lack the critical ability to properly re-direct content when necessary. 301s are valuable for expired content, pages that require versioning, and assist in minimizing keyword cannibalization.
XML/RSS Pinging
Content widgets within Lotus CMS can be syndicated as RSS or Atom feeds. Lotus also allows site owners to increase the visibility of their content in RSS directories by providing a module that notifies RSS ping services when content is updated so it can be syndicated and spidered.
Image-Handling & Alt Tags
From an SEO perspective, image Alt tags are a must-have and serve as the anchor text for images and provides relevant, indexable content for search engines. Lotus also allows images contained within CMS navigational elements to use CSS-image replacement in lieu of alt tags; this setting is provided in the administration back-end.
CSS Exceptions
All page elements and widgets within Lotus CMS can be formatted and transformed using cascading style sheets (CSS). User may also manually override the CSS at the page or widget-level. Content writers have a high degree of control over the presentation of their content.
Static Caching Options
Lotus CMS offers content caching options at the page-level and widget-level. This feature allows Lotus to serve up more pages per minute and when used on high-traffic portions of a site, eliminates unnecessary database connections, thereby improving performance and scalability. Within Lotus, the option to cache pages, or not, can be toggled while managing individual pages.
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