With so many CMS vendors out there selling their wares, how do you determine which ones have the right stuff? Hopefully this simple checklist of the top 10 requirements will help you to separate the “wheat from the chaff” so to speak.

1. Multilingual – Can the CMS cater for any language both on the front and back end?

2. Scalable architecture – Can the software be load balanced across multiple web servers? Is it cluster aware? Can it perform under pressure or does it fail whale? Ask for 3rd party test results.

3. Migration tools – Does it come with tools or methods for migrating tens of thousands of pages of content?

4. Web standards – Can it produce clean, semantic HTML and accessible content?

5. Documentation/support – Is it backed up with appropriate technical documentation and user guides? Is the product supported locally by a team of developers?

6. Installers – Does it have a simple 1 click installation, or is an army of engineers required to make it work?

7. Secure – Ask the vendor when the application had its last security review. Does it have formal accreditation?

8. Usability – Where does the user interface sit on the hierarchy of users’ needs?

9. Extensible – Does it have a mature API or SDK allowing it to be easily integrated or extended?

10. Search – Is a comprehensive search engine ‘baked in’ or will you need to buy an expensive 3rd party tool?

11. (I know I said 10 but this list “goes up to 11”) Metadata – Is the content underpinned by a robust metadata framework or is information management a manual task?

Not all of these requirements are essential for everyone but asking these questions will definitely tell you if the product is a mature and stable offering.

BTW I haven’t listed “SEO friendly” as a checklist item because I essentially see it as a subset of point 4.

The larger vendors excel at many of the checkpoints but often fall short on web standards and usability. It’s usually the opposite for the smaller players. It’s no wonder low end CMS’s have made such a dent, but these offerings can be lacking in other key areas such as security and migration.

It’s often the mid-tier vendors (disclaimer: I work for one) that tick the most boxes because they usually pre-date the enterprise players and have the advantage of being agile, coupled with extensive domain knowledge in a relatively new field.

No entries since June, in fact the year has been a bit of blur. We were playing foosball in January and then February hit and the business went into overdrive. This wasn’t unexpected but the sudden intensity was a bit of a shock to the system. From all accounts the rapid uptick in enterprise Web Content Management projects has been widespread with many vendors reporting triple digit revenue growth.  It seems the web may have been the antidote for the GFC.  After all, the Web channel is a relatively inexpensive medium compared to TV, print and radio and if it’s done well it can be a lot more effective.

This got me thinking. In a market which is full of vendors and potential customers how do you target your offering, what is your point of differentiation and where is your sweet spot? I love graphs and I visualised this 2 x 2…

Right now in the year 2009 there are still many organisations that are just discovering that they can manage their own website. On the other hand, there are many organisations with in-house web teams embracing social media and forging concepts that may indeed become known as “web 3.0”.

In the middle of these diametrically opposed organisations (technologically speaking) is corporate middle Australia. These are organisations with moderate web maturity. They’ve learnt some hard lessons and are only beginning to implement 2nd and 3rd generation solutions. They tend to outsource their web requirements but have moved to bring in limited web resources, moving responsibility away from I.T into the hands of marketing (or should I say, marketing has wrested control from I.T.)

These organisations are quickly developing an appetite for online marketing and ecommerce. High end vendors may scoff at these relative newbies as “difficult” but they do so at their peril.

These are the organisations we love to help and this is where our technology offering excels. This is our sweet spot!

The MSDN flash newsletter that arrived in my inbox today ran with the subject line “New IIS Search Engine Optimization beta”. To quote from the story…

The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and server administrators improve their sites’ relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly.

Brad installed it on a test server and reports that it is freakin awesome. Great to see Microsoft stepping up it’s game in this space. Of course to make any use of this you need to be running your website on IIS 7.0 or higher.

Here is a screenshot of results against a basic DNN site. Download

A few murmurs in the SEOsphere about Google making a fairly significant change to their rank algorithm in an attempt to nullify the increasing number of spam sites achieving a high rank for their targeted keywords. The spammers do this by writing scripts to create large volumes of sites, pages and comments to blogs and forums with links targeting their chosen keywords. Due to the automation, the links tend to appear in a very short space of time, hence link velocity. Google can identify this phenomenon by looking at the time period that the links were created. However, it is not a failsafe process because this can also be mistaken for natural viral activity. Typically, the key differentiator will be the general spaminess of the page/site providing the backlink. This can’t be a trivial process but it is fairly crucial that Google work it out lest their results start to become peppered with irrelevant/spammy sites. I guess it’s also a warning to SEO practitioners engaged in link building campaigns for their customers. The general rule of thumb: quality will always outweigh and outperform quantity. This will no doubt be an interesting space to watch…

A long time ago in galaxy far far away Community Manager 3.0 existed. The year was 2003 and Search Engine Optimisation was a mysterious force known only to a handful of code Jedi’s and the URL’s universe was full of parameters such as…

http://www.elcom.com.au/default.aspx?folderid=5&articleid=21

These URLs really didn’t make much sense to an end user and were not very memorable. As the code Jedi’s began to master the SEO force they realised that URL’s containing human readable keywords could help users and improve search rank and so the era of user friendly URL’s was ushered in.

In 2004 Community Manager 4.0 was released with a feature that allowed the user to specify URLs a technique known as URL rewriting.

Happy days…for a while….but then, along came duplicate URLs.

As you may or may not be aware duplicate URLs are bad. Search engines don’t like to index or present identical or even near identical copies of the same information as it’s wasteful and often indicates a spammy site. However, there are many valid reasons that your site could contain duplicate content, for example print friendly pages or the same product page in an ecommerce system that exists within two categories.

The best way to handle these duplication issues has been via the implementation of a robots.txt with use of the nofollow tag or permanent redirects which all help to inform the search engine crawlers to exclude various bits of content, however this is not entirely easy to manage in the real world of content management.

That is until now…because screening at your local search engine…(this is for fans of Kentucky Fried Movie – to be said in a movie promo voice…)

He was a content management system…

She was a web page…

Together they made…..Canonical URLs

Canonical or relcan as it’s affectionately referred has SEO folk jumping for joy. Can what? Canonical – pronounced CAN – NON – ICLE – sounds a bit like a planet in the vicinity of Tatooine. Wikipedia defines canonical as…

“reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality”

It is a feature that lets you specify the preferred version of a URL. To implement it, simply add a <link> tag to the <head> section of your duplicate content page.

e.g <link rel=”canonical” href=http://www.elcom.com.au/products/web-manager/default.aspx />

The introduction of this feature makes life a lot easier for web developers to specify duplicate URLs so hopefully duplicate will quickly became a relic of the old web. For more details on this great new feature have a look at Google Webmaster Blog.

If you’re not familiar with Google Webmaster Tools you’re missing out on a great service to help manage how Google view your web assets.

One of our customers old staging sites recently found it’s way into the Google index. Needless to say they weren’t impresses but Google Webmaster has a tool to quickly remove a single page or an entire site from their index. Warning: proceed with caution when using the removal tool, it would be umm….bad to accidentally remove your live site from Google’s index.

The service also provides site diagnostics such as page not found, URL’s not followed, top search queries, sitemap creation and submission and what the Googlebot sees, to name just a few.

A particularly useful tool is a report which tells you where a page not found is linked from.

The image above shows me that the ATS site has a company profile on elcom which is linking to an old page that no longer exists. Better get that fixed. So you can probably see the value of this tool, it is effectively a very accurate broken link checker.

This is of particular interest to me at the moment as we are designing a link management tool for CommunityManager.NET our web content management product, which will automatically prompt the user to reassign links that are inadvertently broken.

Oh and even though Google accounts for a whopping 90% of searches performed (according to Hitwise) I should mention that Yahoo also has a Webmaster tool called Site Explorer and like everything Yahoo does, its extremely well designed, but more on that in another post because I have to run to find the afikoman now.

If you manage a blog you’ll probably empathise with my recent theme jumping. I’ve kept it fairly plain and consistent over the past few years but it times to shake the boat. Whoa, what’s this you say, a 4 column theme called Fjord04 from WordPress. Font is quite small, will require lot’s of scrolling but I’m interested to see what the mobile browsers think of it. Let me know if it works for you…

Today I joined over 300 people at Luna Park for the annual Sydney Search Marketing Expo. According to Barry Smyth, the event organiser, this years expo has attracted a larger number of attendees than in past years which is consistent with my opinion on the activity around SEO and SEM during a GFC. It seems more and more organisations especially large organisations are embracing SEO and SEM consultants. The industry has really grown up since the bad old days of keyword stuffing, white text on white background, link pages and all those other lovely tricks that gave the activities a bad name. Now the focus is firmly on generating traffic, quality content and conversions.

I’m going to use this blog entry as a catch all for everything downloaded to my brain today in order to share with my work colleagues who were eager to attend and to anyone else interested. I’ll assume a fair bit of knowledge and of course will only reveal enough to get you one rank below my results lol – actually that reminds me of my fav comment of the day from Greg Boser in relation to SERP rank “if you’re above me you’re a spammer, if your below me you suck. “

Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ

A high rank creates a perception of trust

SEO is about fixing problems and maximising opportunities

On TrustRank – “Of 60 billion pages indexed only 5 billion would be worthwhile” Google engineer

The se algorithmic mix…

• Trust/Authority – 35%
• Usage Data – 10%
• Page level link metrics – 25%
• On page and keyword factors – 30% (in our control)

The SEO Pyramid

• Social
• Link Building
• Keyword research
• Accessible and Quality Content

On the consultant versus in-house SEo consultant question – Need in house people that can craft strategies and live and breath SEO

• SEO is not free (just high ROI)
• SEO is not guaranteed (the engines don’t owe you)
• SEO changes constantly (keep up to date)
• SEO is a tactic (but requires strategy)

Emerging Trends in SEO (Rands opinion)

• More awareness of SEO in general especially since financial collapse
• More crackdown on SPAM and Manipulation
• More tools and metrics
• More data sources for the engines
• Social media emerging w/ SEO
• More options in the SERPs
• QDA (Query Deserves Freshness)

Cindi Crum – RankMobile – Integrated mobile marketing

What’s new in mobile search

• People on mobiles have immediate intent
• Mobile phone is the most personal marketing medium ever
• iphones have 5% market share in the US but make up 75% of mobile searches
• Expect massive surge of people searching via mobile due to iphone and clones
• Mobile web search indicates desire for immediate action

Challenges

• Many different browsers on handsets
• Inconsistent coverage
• Expensive
• User education

Types of Search

• On-deck search i.e a carrier based search (walled or semi walled) usually monetized content and downloads. Carriers have massive targeting power
• Off Deck i.e traditional search engines, not controlled by carriers
• Mobile Search Applications

Engines are using website mobile quality as part of the algorithmic mix. In other words your site which renders badly on a mobile is marked down in mobile results

Dot mobi is bad for search engines

• Not universally accepted
• Cumbersome development standards
• No unique assets or features
• Limited useful life (in future won’t need sep sites)
• Bad for SEO
• Bad for consumers

Architecture

• Sites should stack
• Note the order of content and page fold height
• Javascript and Ajax will display in full
• There are a number of testing sites for checking how sites render on mobile phones
• Popups cause a lot of mobile phones to crash. If ur site crashes a phone the user will NEVER return
• Use display: none to hide elements (but remember they’ll still load)
• Submit your site to mobile search engines, they’re looking for good content
• Google has a separate search page for the iphone
• iphone ignores handheld stylesheet
• iphone has a metatag “viewport” let’s you set a different width

Monte Huebsch – Owner of AussieWeb – Maps and Local Listings

To get better organic results Matt cuts says you should do two things…

• Be in maps and local business directory
• Blog

40% of queries have local intent

62% search online and then buy in stores

Google say their local listings data come from business, web and reviews

Microsoft say their directory data comes from the Yellow Pages

Google recenty dropped data provision from truelocal for yellow pages

Google maps is number 1 in terms of traffic search – data comes from yellow plus reviews etc… Map data sciences does map data

Whereis uses yellow

Microsoft uses mylocal a business listings site – can’t claim your listing in MS you need to be in yellow

Once you complete the local data listing for Google they will rank your data higher

Truelocal used to power Google, they still power yahoo7

Enhanced listing with truelocal is $750 per year

Hotfrog is a free directory and have a PR 6

Aussieweb is a free directory

The local listing traffic goes to…

1. Google

2. Yellow

3. Hotfrog

4. Truelocal

5. Aussieweb

6. Ninemsn

7. Yahoo7

Ranking factors for maps

• Proximity to address
• Number of quality reviews
• Keyword relevancy
• SEO characteristics of related website
• Linking back to your local listing
• Video content

Issues

• One location that serves multiple areas
• Multiple location but only 1 website
• No address – mobile provider

Jason West – Web Salad – Video Optimisation

Some stats

• Video search on youtube accounts for ¼ of all Google searches in USA (Comscore)
• 13 hrs of video are uploaded to youtube every minutes
• 80 million videos watched every day
• 200,000 new video uploaded daily

Eyes are now ending to focus on video pictures in the SERPs

Video is not indexed , it’s what you do around the video that counts

Try to find the podcast and vodcast directories that target your theme

Youtube is ‘nofollow’

Shorter video is better avg you tube video is 2.5 minutes

• Shorter = more views
• More views = more popular
• More popular = more comments/bookmarks
• More comments/bookmarks = higher pr

Optimising video is similar to web seo

• Video title
• Keywords in description
• Put url back to website in description
• Use target keywords as your youtube keyword tags
• Generate views, comments on your video
• Cross promote from blog, facebook etc…
• Targeted anchor text back to video
• Link it back to your site
• Call to action at end of video

Podcasting

• Time is taken out of consideration because people take the content offline
• ABC is in one of the top 2 or 3 podcasters in the world by downloads
• BBC get avg 1M downloads per month for podradio and 1.3 for world service
• Setup RSS – link up subscribers (submit to itunes)
• Bandwidth considerations – potentially huge
• Distribution – from your website, blog, directories, podcast search engines
• SEO – transcripts, keyword them around the topic
• Main podcast directories are itunes and yahoo

Content ideas

• Weekly features on new projects
• Short promo videos
• Instructional podcasts
• Thank you videos
• Goal should be to tell their friends (viral)

The future

• Google are starting to understand and index the audio

Q & A

The Contact Us page is dead. Should just be on every page

Jane Copeland – Search Marketer – AYIMA Search Marketing

Internal linking is the most important on page SEO factor

• Allows people to find content on the site
• Allows search engines to nav the site
• Search engines actually rank pages not websites
• Pagerank must be passed onto deeper pages

Common site links

• Nav – be consistent, remove barriers
• Content
• Secondary or Tertiary – promotes deep linking
• Breadcrumb
• Footer – have been devalued because they often take a pages links to over 100 and have been abused for spam
• Site wide
• Resources links (eg tags, categories, related resources etc…) – usually link to useless pages with no content, use them sparingly – suggest nofollowing them
• Editorial links – the most valuable i.e links in content (only the first link to a particular page is counted – i.e no point linking over and over again with the same anchor text)

Suggestion: Avoid the Wikipedia model of internal editorial linking

Passing page rank – each page has a certain amount of page rank it owns and a certain amount it can give out. Sites don’t lose anything by passing page rank on.

Best type of link is basic HTML and not an image link

Each of these are viewed and valued differently by SE’s

Take control of a sites internal linking to make sure authority is passed correctly e.g nofollow pages like, terms, privacy and help

No danger in using nofollow from a trust perspective

Using no follow means that in the SE’s eyes your page does not exist

Keyword Cannibalisation – instead of targeting the same keyword all the time for every page send them all to the important page

Absolute link versus relative links – best practice is to use absolute links

If you must use relative URL’s use the BASE tags

Subdomains are seen as separate entities e.g wordpress blogs do not inherit page rank from WordPress

Do not send internal links through redirects of any sort

Avoid pagination

Do not attach complex tracking code to internal links

Google ignores content following a #

Use less than 100 links per page

Greg Boser – 301 redirects

301 is your most important SEO tool

IIS redirects default to 302 (bad)

use 301’s for misspellings in urls for search

Google hate conditional redirects because they have to trust a site far more than they want to

relCan is much better from googles perspective

Rel=canonical only came out a month ago

http://www.netconcepts.com/learn/301-redirects.ppt

Have you every wondered why Adobe kept Fireworks in CS after buying Macromedia? After all Adobe had a very similar product in Photoshop. A few of our Designers attended one of the Adobe training days at Darling Harbour last week and learnt amongst other things a key difference between Fireworks and Photoshop – image compression.

Every designer know how to save for web in their sleep. Resizing and downsampling the image to 72dpi and setting the compression rate to 60% or 80% for best results is a part of every web designers repertoire but getting the right mix of file size and quality has always been a challenge.

What we were interested to discover was that Fireworks does a far superior job at compressing the image and maintaining quality than photoshop.

Here is a sample of the same jpg image compressed with Fireworks and Photoshop at 80% quality.

The Fireworks image on the left came out at 55kb whilst the Photoshop image is at 96kb. That’s a huge difference….

and here’s another couple of images. The Photoshop image (left) has been reduced to match the Fireworks image (right) file size 16KB.

If we can shave almost 50% filesize off every image whilst maintaining quality then in my opinion Fireworks pays for itself on day one.

In setting work goals for 2009 it’s worthwhile to look back and reflect on what we have achieved in 2008. So spending 5 minutes thinking about it I was able to put together quite an impressive list…

• Released 9 major product updates
• Developed 5 new products
  • Intranet Manager.NET
  • Training Manager.NET
  • Induction Manager.NET
  • Partner Portal.NET
  • Government Portal.NET
• Ran 2 product launches and 3 user groups
• Designed and implemented a completely new User Interface for the Community Manager platform
• Designed and developed a new corporate website and attained a PageRank 7
• Established a successful and highly trafficked Elcom Community Portal
• Major infrastructure updates including the implementation of a new phone system
• Improved our internal sales, development and project management processes

There is a lot to be proud of and it makes me wonder how we could possibly outdo that in 2009, but we’re definitely up for the challenge.