SEO vs. Expression Engine
I’ve been looking into whether or not we should employ a CMS for our website and had am evaluating Expression Engine. A friend mentioned EE to me about a year ago, and I remember being impressed by the clean interface and rich feature set. But this time around, I’m digging deeper into the functionality and can’t seem to find anything that addresses SEO features for EE.
Searching through Expression Engine’s search forums I came across a lot of uninformed, and frankly, totally incorrect assumptions about making website pages SEO friendly. The kicker was when I came across this EE employee’s response to a customer question about SEO:
If Expression Engine’s employees think that SEO is “voodoo,” I shouldn’t get my hopes up about “voodoo” features like canonical URLs, 301 redirects, no-follow tags or custom navigation/categorization structure.
Ironically, the title of the forum post was “SEO vs. EE.” That should’ve been another clue.
August 1st, 2009 at 8:18am
I think you’re being too hard on that EE’s employee. What that fellow Ingmar said was pretty accurate, and I think he was making a joke about the “Black Art” of SEO. Did you see the emoticon?
Google doesn’t reveal much about how its search algorithms work. They don’t want people to figure out how to trick it. So, that mystery leaves a lot of room for speculation, and there are a heck of a lot of bad guess out there.
I think people are little too focused on keywords in their URLs. Does Microsoft have SEO-friendly URLs? No. They have content-rich sites that lots of people link-to.
Sure, a pertinent second and even third level domain name is very useful, but the two most useful things I’ve found are #1: Lot’s of relevant links from other sites (Remember the “miserable failure” situation?), and #2: Relevant human-readable content on the pages.
You know how I can tell that search engines don’t care that much about what’s in the “resource” part of the URL: When I search for something, I always get an equal number of results from forums that have SEO-friendly URLs as those that don’t.
August 1st, 2009 at 10:30am
Thanks for the feedback, MarkerB. I’m sorry I have to take exception to your comments though. Ingmar is only half right: relevant content, valid markup and [quality, not spammy] inbound links are all very important to SEO. However, so is keyword use in the title tag, keyword use in the domain name, link/domain authority (and most likely how close it is in the link graph to a seed site), the age of the site, anchor text of inbound links, and more.
Some of these things you have a lot of control over and some you have very little. In my opinion, a CMS that doesn’t give you control over (at minimum) writing your own title tags, urls, meta-descriptions, and adding no-follow and no-index where needed, isn’t going to cut it for most SEOs. Adding the ability to manage permanent URL redirects in your apache or nginx config files would be an added bonus (I don’t know of any current CMS that lets you do this).
I can’t say whether Ingmar was joking or not when he said, “the rest is SEO voodoo.” But I imagine if he understood SEO better, and EE provided SEO-friendly functionality, he would have addressed the issue differently. In any case, SEO is absolutely not voodoo. And while there may be poor speculation (from people who don’t understand SEO), there is more accurate, well-researched and documented information based on solid, quantifiable data.
I should mention that this wasn’t the only ill-informed response in EE’s forums to an enquiry about SEO features, it just happened to be the one I used to illustrate my point.
September 24th, 2009 at 3:00am
Perhaps one should remark that EE gives you control over (at minimum) writing your own title tags, urls, meta-descriptions, and adding no-follow and no-index where needed.
P.S.: I was told to inform you that WordPress 2.8.4 is available.