Squarespace, Content Management Systems and SEO

Content Management Systems (CMS) are now a fact of life–even a necessity–for companies both large and small; whether it be Microsoft Sharepoint or start-up companies such as Squarespace, the basic idea remains the same: to encourage and facilitate content contributions throughout your company, and allow your web manager(s) to spend more time planning and creating content (white papers, news releases, videos, etc.) instead of writing seemingly endless amounts of code.

So, what could possibly be the drawback with that? Although it might seem relatively minor, given the simple, easy-to-use WYSIWYG blog-style interface of most systems, some Content Management Systems seem to more or less choke on even perfectly written code entered in HTML view. Working with Squarespace, I’ve seen brackets disappear or break (rendering, of course, the content gibberish or eliminating it entirely depending on the permissiveness of the browser) while noticing the sudden appearance of repetitive or meaningless tags (I didn‘t enter that table body tag!). Not to single out Squarespace, but it can get pretty…hinky…under the hood. And from an SEO perspective, that’s not exactly a  good thing when you want crawlers properly indexing and ranking your site (especially since crawlers don‘t seem to enjoy parsing through great amounts of extraneous code to get to the content they‘ve evolved to evaluate).

Now don’t get me wrong…there’s nothing at all wrong with the concept of creating content for your web site without getting bogged down in endless hours of writing code (hey, I enjoy coding sometimes, but I don‘t want to spend hours a day doing it…I‘d rather be writing, networking with content creators and strategizing with my boss). CMS solutions do indeed free up valuable time for other tasks: SEO, strategy, keyword research, competitive analysis, social networking and viral marketing. And that’s a good thing: it’s what Content Management Systems are designed to do.

But even though the idea is to promote a relatively hands-off approach when it comes to writing code, there are definitely times when it’s absolutely vital to customize existing tags (ALT tags, of course, to cite just one example) and to enter SEO friendly tags that form the basis for emerging best practices (ACRONYM tags, for example). And then there’s the matter of entering keywords for individual pages; although Squarespace doesn’t permit such editing and claims their sites are already optimized for SEO (questionable at best, since I’ve never, ever heard of out-of-the-box optimization). You’ll hear a lot of conflicting opinions these days about the importance of keywords, but given that the best SEO strategy is a holistic approach, do you really want to live without them? My own research indicates that keywords are decreasing in importance, but I’m not exactly ready to do without them entirely.

Ultimately, however, the regular publication of keyword-rich, market-relevant content is the single most important factor in gaining search engine traction and, ultimately, higher rankings. The main idea should be to use your content to increase qualified traffic and conversions, and leverage relevant social networking opportunities to increase the number, quality and inbound links to your site. This is the most important key to an uptick in traffic and the search engine placement you (realistically) desire. All it takes is hard work…ready to get started?

Content Management Systems (CMS) are now a fact of life–even a necessity–for companies both large and small; whether it be Microsoft Sharepoint or start-up companies such as Squarespace, the basic idea remains the same: to encourage and facilitate content contributions throughout your company, and allow your web manager(s) to spend more time planning and creating content (white papers, news releases, videos, etc.) instead of writing seemingly endless amounts of code.

So, what could possibly be the drawback with that? Although it might seem relatively minor, given the simple, easy-to-use WYSIWYG blog-style interface of most systems, some Content Management Systems seem to more or less choke on even perfectly written code entered in HTML view. Working with Squarespace, I’ve seen brackets disappear or break (rendering, of course, the content gibberish or eliminating it entirely depending on the permissiveness of the browser) while noticing the sudden appearance of repetitive or meaningless tags (I didn‘t enter that table body tag!). Not to single out Squarespace, but it can get pretty…hinky…under the hood. And from an SEO perspective, that’s not exactly a  good thing when you want crawlers properly indexing and ranking your site (especially since crawlers don‘t seem to enjoy parsing through great amounts of extraneous code to get to the content they‘ve evolved to evaluate).

Now don’t get me wrong…there’s nothing at all wrong with the concept of creating content for your web site without getting bogged down in endless hours of writing code (hey, I enjoy coding sometimes, but I don‘t want to spend hours a day doing it…I‘d rather be writing, networking with content creators and strategizing with my boss). CMS solutions do indeed free up valuable time for other tasks: SEO, strategy, keyword research, competitive analysis, social networking and viral marketing. And that’s a good thing: it’s what Content Management Systems are designed to do.

But even though the idea is to promote a relatively hands-off approach when it comes to writing code, there are definitely times when it’s absolutely vital to customize existing tags (ALT tags, of course, to cite just one example) and to enter SEO friendly tags that form the basis for emerging best practices (ACRONYM tags, for example). And then there’s the matter of entering keywords for individual pages; although Squarespace doesn’t permit such editing and claims their sites are already optimized for SEO (questionable at best, since I’ve never, ever heard of out-of-the-box optimization). You’ll hear a lot of conflicting opinions these days about the importance of keywords, but given that the best SEO strategy is a holistic approach, do you really want to live without them? My own research indicates that keywords are decreasing in importance, but I’m not exactly ready to do without them entirely.

Ultimately, however, the regular publication of keyword-rich, market-relevant content is the single most important factor in gaining search engine traction and, ultimately, higher rankings. The main idea should be to use your content to increase qualified traffic and conversions, and leverage relevant social networking opportunities to increase the number, quality and inbound links to your site. This is the most important key to an uptick in traffic and the search engine placement you (realistically) desire. All it takes is hard work…ready to get started?

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