Improve your search engine ranking with
the 123Live Content Management System 

Traditional Content Management Systems (CMS) can actually damage your chances of getting indexed by search engines so you could be missing out on free traffic.

Don't take our word for it, this article from CMS watch says it all (not for the technophobic!).

 

Seven ways that 123Live generates search engine friendly websites

1. No database

Content managed websites are normally generated dynamically from a database. Unless you have a big-shot website the search engines are likely to ignore database driven pages.

123Live websites are regular HTML - not database driven.

 

2. No querystrings

A querystring is the bit after the "?" in a web address,
e.g. yoursite.co.uk?item=465&category=products

Here's what Google (the biggest and fastest growing search engine) told us about querystrings:

“Thank you for your note. The Google index does include pages that have question marks in their URLs . . . However, these pages comprise a very small portion of our index. Pages that contain question marks in their URLs can cause problems for our crawler and may be ignored.”

- The Google Team

123Live websites do not use querystrings.

 

3. No frames

Framed websites are comprised of pages within special "frame" pages and can usually be recognised by the appearance of scrollbars within the page rather than just on the right or bottom.

Frames are a no-no for search engines because all they see is the top level frame page, which does not contain any indexable content at all, just references to the sub-pages. Unfortunately many web design software packages such as Microsoft Frontpage encourage the use of frames.

123Live sites avoid using frames.

 

4. Regular HTML header tags

An HTML tag tells the browser how to render the text within the tag. You don't see the tag, just the text within it. For example the heading at the top of this page is written as <H1>How to build a search . . . </H1>, this tells the browser to make this a top level header.

The header tags also have another function, they tell the search engine that this bit of text is much more important than other text on the page, so if it finds someone's search term in an H1 tag it will give the page a higher ranking. The header tags are numbered from one to six, with six being the least important.

When you select a header style for your text in the 123Live editor you are applying these header tags. Many web designers use other methods of formatting text which don't work the same magic with search engines.

 

5. No javascript links

Fancy navigation systems often use links that use a programming language called javascript. This has the major downside that search engines simply cannot follow the links to other pages on your website, so as far as engines like Google are concerned those pages don't exist.

123Live websites use regular HTML links.

 

6. Text links

A great many websites use graphical links, especially in the main site navigation. Apart from taking longer to load, graphical links cannot be read by search engines. They can follow the link but they can't get any contextual sense from it.

123Live websites use text links, which allow the search engines to "weight" the target page according to the text. For example, the link to this page is "search engines", which tells the search engines to rank this page higher on a search for that phrase.

 

7. We avoid rendering text as graphics or Flash

Text rendered as graphic images or Flash cannot be read by search engines, so we keep this to an absolute minimum.

 

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