Monthly Archives: August 2006

ECM, Search Engines

CMS can cause SEO problems

The Portable Consultant’s current client’s web sites are under the management of the Sales & Marketing group. They would like to ensure that any new CMS won’t create complex URLs that would upset the search engines that come calling.

Today’s CMS’s tend to create URLs with long strings of unintelligible parameters. They work better this way, but people do not. More importantly, it turns out, neither do search engines. These “ugly URLs” are not only hard for users to remember and enter into their browser, but are also awkward for search engines to use when crawling links within a site. They may well bypass many or all of the internal pages of a site for this reason.

While looking for a good explanation of these issues to show my client I came across Non-Linear Creations’ whitepaper SEO and CMS: Implementing Best Practices. A version of this paper by Randy Woods and Julie Batten is available on CMS Watch with the title Embedding SEO Best Practices in CMS Implementations.

Cheers,
-pmh

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ECM

We need more like Muyiwa

The Portable Consultant is working at a client site these days, helping with the strategic and technical requirements for a web content management system prior to preparation of an RFP.

One of my points has been that web content should be archived since it is one component of enterprise content and, as such, should be treated as business records.

Hearing that our WCM project might have something to do with archiving, Muyiwa dropped by to chat. His team is finishing off a Lotus Notes e-mail project that he felt should have addressed the issue of e-mail archiving, but didn’t. He is planning to pass that back on up the chain of command for management to consider.

This is great! A down-in-the-trenches employee passing along the message that this important issue needs to be addressed.

We need more like him.

Cheers,
-pmh