Choose a CMS like Wordpress for SEO - SEO Podcast - Number 81

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to podcast number 81. 81. And we're on a fun-filled Friday. This is, we also do websites. We also do websites. Yeah. This is, like Paul said, this is podcast number 81. You are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Unfortunately, we're not broadcasting the video of this live right now, and we'll blame it entirely on Ustream, because we have no other evidence to blame ourselves. Yes, and that works for me any time. Not saying that we actually really searched a lot for evidence to blame ourselves. We just said it's not working. Boo on Ustream. The tip. I was going to say what we talked about last week. The tip from last podcast was find the keyword tool that works best for you. So, if this sounds kind of like a weird tip, that means you need to go back and listen to our last podcast. That's podcast number 80. But it was a good podcast. There's some things that have changed a little bit or have changed over the last few months with the Google Keyword Selector tool. I read an article, and it was confirmed. So, I went looking for other keyword tools out there as well. Once again, we have to give a boo to Google. Yeah, come on, dude. Yeah, seriously. They took our links in and out as a keyword tool. And if you're like me, you probably notice that if you use that sucker like daily or at least every other day, I'm sure you probably notice it over the last six months. The tool has gone through a lot of different changes, some good, some bad. Which were the good ones? I'll get back to you on that. I'm not trying to call you out or anything. I like the design. It's a great layout. Nice personality. That's like when we get clients and really the best I can say is you have a lovely design. Your search engine placement is horrible.

Your on-page SEO is horrible. I like this pretty color you got. Your SEVO search engine visitor optimization is horrible. We understand why you're visiting us. And it is quite lovely. Yeah. But your wife's really nice. We have to be careful when we like really go after a website when it's horrible because, you know, his wife may have made it. I'm going to say that some of us are more careful. Yeah. Some of us just be dogging people out on the phone. It's really funny because, you know, when somebody says, I'm not trying to, you know, give you a hard time on your website, but. Yeah. And let me proceed to give you a hard time on your website. If you cry after I say this, I'm not sorry. I know who made it, and I'm not sorry. You guys want to stalk us, follow us, tweet us, burp us. I don't know where that came from. We need a website. Burp us.com or something. I don't know. Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. Facebook.com slash eWebStyle. You can watch our videos. And we are actually recording the video of this, so we will post it up. I think we can add it back up to Ustream. And we'll definitely be cutting it and putting it up on YouTube. Our YouTube account is most easily found at e-webstyle.com slash YouTube. And when you want to watch this, when Ustream is actually working and we are broadcasting live at 9.15 Central Standard Time on Friday mornings, then you can go to e-webstyle slash Ustream. That's the letter U. We will eventually get that incorporated into our webpage. I am excited. Not only do we have a review, we have an ingenious user, listener, listener, not user, who has figured out another way to give us reviews. Other than iTunes? Other than iTunes and other than our Facebook, because we've gotten a couple good reviews on Facebook. He went to Podomatic, and on podcast number 75, he made a comment. So you guys can check this out. We're actually going to

go ahead and post it on Facebook. I think I'm about three reviews behind. If you go to the discussions area of our Facebook page, I try and post all of our reviews over there. Good and bad. In fact, I put the bad one before even some of these good ones. That's cool. You know, we're just straight up honest. This guy's from Australia, but he's not from the western coast. Western Australia? Which is officially a state. So you'll actually believe that this is on dry land. He's actually from Melbourne. He says, Hey guys, I love listening to your podcasts. I listen from Melbourne, Australia. We already covered that. In case you weren't paying attention. I wait to download your podcasts and listen to them several times. I have used some of your tips and can't thank you enough. Kind regards, Lee Cummings, Clarity Coach. So I'm sure if you Google Lee Cummings, Clarity Coach. Hit us up with a URL. So we can give you a little link love. We would love to give you a little link love. And he says he's only used some of our tips. So I imagine he's probably on page two. Oh yeah, you're tripping. You gotta get caught up, boss. Let us know. Get us a report. Yeah, if you guys go out there, that'd be great. Go write a review on Podomatic. Go friend us on Podomatic or follow us on Podomatic. Or on YouTube. Or on YouTube. Or you can follow us on Facebook. Actually, we got two new Facebook followers. So that's pretty exciting. I keep getting emails on Twitter. I don't really know what happens. Because sometimes I get new followers. An email saying that there's new followers. And then I go and it seems like the same number. Although I'm not paying 100% attention. So follow us on Twitter. Don't just go check out our Twitter account. Actually follow us. What else do we got? That was good. You know, I think I might be done. Oh yeah, I got news. I got news.

I'm sorry, Gino. Thanks for tuning in, guys. Gino, I'm sorry. I actually do have news. There's a web... There's actually a service called Replint, I think it is. And they have actually been... They collect information on you. They probably know who you are. They certainly know how much you're jogging right now. Okay. So they can probably tell you how fit you are. They can probably sell information to insurance to say, Hey, this is a good guy to go after. Because he's probably not going to die in the next six months. Thanks. I appreciate that. And Google's probably going to buy them. Since they have so much information. Did I ever tell you about the best cold call I ever handled? No. I got this call and it was a lady. She's like, I'm calling about life insurance. And I was like, I don't need life insurance. And she's like, well, I know it's not for you. We don't want to think about this. But this is for the people you could leave behind. And I went, no. I just got back from my psychic. I'm not going to die for at least five years. Call me in four years and six months. She was like, well... Have a nice day. What retort do you have to that? I mean, that's like... Absolutely not. That's like the people who are like, I am on the first page of Google. Really? Because I Googled you before I called you. And you're not. Oh, you mean when you type in your name and city and phone number? Yes. Oh, yeah, of course you are. You're probably on the first page. So apparently they've like combined Facebook IDs into what they do. And so, you know, everyone who's paranoid about information. And I'm not saying you shouldn't be. I'm just not sure exactly what you can do except for disengage socially. Which, really, social engagement is kind of the last option for nerds. So if they disengage... Good luck. They're just... Good luck. They're just... We're going to see

a lot more weird stuff on universities from bell towers. All right. The other thing I got here is Facebook ads may be outing gays. I saw... Did you see that article? I saw it on your computer yesterday. It does sound a lot worse than it actually is. All they did is they created six Facebook accounts. Two guys interested in women. Two women interested in guys. One guy interested in guys. And one woman interested in women. And it turns out that there was a significant difference between the ads that were being shown. And this is specifically against Facebook's policy. Like, sexual orientation is not supposed to be a deciding factor in what ads are shown. By the way, that's kind of stupid, in my opinion. I mean, if you're going to say, I am gay, then there is actually different ads that you would probably be more interested in than, say, me. I think so. Because of your other lifestyle differences. So I don't even know why that's a... I mean, you shouldn't discriminate. It shouldn't be, although, you know, there's a fine line between what is discrimination, showing a different ad. I mean, are there gay people out there really upset that they're getting gay nightclub ads instead of depends ads? Yeah. I don't know. Anyway. That could go a whole long direction. A whole different direction. So, yeah, they're not really outing them. These are professed gay people, and they're showing them different ads. I really don't know what the deal is there. Oh, my WordPress. This is going to lead directly into what we're going to talk about today. So last night, I was working on one of our clients, Hippard Law, and he's got a blog. So he's got the website and the blog, and I was going into permalinks on WordPress, and for those of you who don't know WordPress or content management systems, it's a way to change the link so that the link isn't really ugly, like hippardlaw.com slash blog slash article two. Instead of saying article two, you

really want it to say, like, the title of the article because that's powerful keywords that are in the URL. So I went to turn it on, and when I tried to use the blog to test it, because we test thoroughly here, 404, which is a page not found error. And I was like, what's going on? So I tried all these iterations. I'm like, all right, this is ridiculous. So I go to Google, and I type in one thing, and I didn't really find a good answer. So I go to Google, and I type another thing, and I just really quickly clicked the second link. Guess whose website came up? Hours? Yes. With a fix? This is how you fix this problem. Yes. Written by you? Written by me. And this guy's really smart. Oh, wait, that's me. Oh, wait, that's our logo. And that's me. So you showed you how to fix that problem. That's what's up, man. That's like customer service at its best. It worked. That eWebStyle has amazing technical people. That's awesome. I think. So awesome, we forget how awesome we are. Oh, man. And I do not recall writing that at all. And it fixed it immediately. I was like, oh, good. Thank you. That's awesome. So you may not remember it, but we actually know what we're talking about here. It's probably, if we don't remember, it's in our blog somewhere. Tell me about it. Those things that I searched for a long time, I know they're valuable not just to us at some point in the future, but to other people. So, and guess what? I tend to use search terms that I would put in a title. Oh, that was great. That was very funny. So that is a great lead-in because we are going to talk about content management systems, solutions systems. If you're a long-time follower of our podcast, wow, we really appreciate it. And we're going to cover some stuff. We're going to cover it from a, I mean, we've talked about what content management

systems you should have and, you know, what features in those content management systems you should have. We think it was about a year ago, our history department, our research department, it was out sick, and so we just took a random guess. About a year ago. About a year ago. But we've, we're kind of like the, what we're finding is we're kind of like the cleanup company for SEOs. When other companies are not interested or not able, you know, we take those clients. And so we end up working with a lot of different content management systems, and we're really open to working with whatever. We've, we've ended up working up with ModX. We've been thrown into ModX projects, actually. And sometimes not on an SEO perspective, but just from a web design perspective, which, you know, it takes a little bit more time, but we're willing to put in the effort to clean up, clean up those projects for, you know, those new clients. Joomla, WordPress, of course, we use as a blog, and are beginning to really investigate and utilize as a content management system. We've got some people here who are really comfortable doing that already, so that's great. And, and so we really thought maybe it's time to revisit it, because we've been struggling with, frankly, Joomla. Yeah. And, and so we. And we all kind of have our likes and dislikes of each individual content management system. So does that mean you've actually gone to the Facebook page and liked and then disliked? Not yet. I don't know, I don't know, man. Don't even get me started on liking Joomla. But I do like, I do like Joomla. There are some nice, nice people. I have some, I have some challenges. And it came up, we're like, hey, if we all have our likes and dislikes, everyone else out there will have some as well. So let's talk about it. And this is a real, I mean, this has been going on for about two weeks in the office. What CMS should

we use? What's this better? Use this one. Use that one. And we had this, I had found this article, I think about a year ago. We talked about it, and I said, hey, it's, it's relevant, because this is what we're going through. That's not the article you gave me. It's not? No. I got this one. Oh. That's kind of cool. Oh, no, no. Same article. I cut, this is a word. I didn't know how to print it. Oh, you don't know how to print? No. No, because it doesn't, is it? Import. Yeah, how to choose code. Okay. I just, you just have a different word. Yeah. I put it, I copied and pasted it into Word. By the way, if you were to Google how to print at eWebStyle, probably there's a blog. I'm sure, I'm sure there probably is. Yeah, because you showed me how to print yesterday. Control P. All right, so yeah, we're, all of our technical glitches have been resolved, except for a Ustream. And let me give a quick shout out to Jeremy Brasher, part owner of Jason's Guac Starter, who I had a phenomenal conversation with and really opened my eyes to WordPress. That just sounds really cool. Jason's Guac Starter. Yes. That just sounds really cool. It is. It looks good, too. I'm going to have my sister in Tennessee go get me some and mail it to me. Oh, cool. So that's what's up. So thanks, Jeremy. We had a great conversation. You definitely opened up my eyes. So today we're going to discuss how to choose a content management system for SEO. This is a great topic, especially if you are an SEOer and you're cranking out websites and they want SEO. You know, you crank out a website, they're going to say, hey, put me on the first page of Google. Okay. So what content management system should you use if you're going to do that? We love content management systems. And what are the specific features in a content management system that you're, because

we're not going to tell you, hey, use Joomla, don't use Joomla, use WordPress, don't use. We're going to say, when you're investigating a content management system, you know, what are the key features that you want to keep in mind as you're looking at, you know, being able to do SEO on those content management systems? Yes. And also, I said it's good for another SEOer. If you are just, if you own a, I think this is good for anybody, but especially if you own a product-related website, an e-commerce website, chances are you are using a content management system. So you definitely should pay attention to this. Yeah. I mean, you could throw OS Commerce into kind of content management system, even though OS Commerce is really focused on, and it's open source, is focused on a shopping cart solution. You know, there's content and it's managing it. So that's kind of inherently a content management system. All right. I think I belabored that point. All right. So one of the first features, these are, we're going to break them down. These are critical features you absolutely have got to have in a content management system. First thing, URL's free of tracking parameters and session IDs. So everybody's been to a website that's like ewebside.com forward slash one, two, three, four, exclamation point, dollar sign equals whatever. That is, you know, tracking parameters and session IDs. Oh, you're talking about our internet marketing page. Oh, yeah. Really? Just gave ourselves away. You know, this just sucks, really, basically, because it doesn't tell, one, it doesn't tell, and I'm the kind of person, I will break apart a URL to try to find it. There's a bunch of forward slashes. I'll say, well, let me break, let me cut these two off and try to go back. I will navigate. You kind of make your own breadcrumbs. I'll navigate with a URL. So it doesn't allow you to do that, and it doesn't give you any, okay, it doesn't have any keywords in the URL. Yeah, that's the

key SEO issue. It doesn't help the user navigate, and it just, you don't know what you're talking about. It doesn't look good. It doesn't look good. It looks very geeky. And when you're in your analytics, I had this problem yesterday, and I'm like, all right, most visited page. Page number three. And I'm like, what? What page is that? Like, I don't know. And it's like 10 pages, most visited page. I'm like, okay. So you want to have real keywords and real URLs. I hadn't thought of that one. That's a really good one. It just happened to me yesterday. You go into analytics, and it's like your favorite page is article 125. You're like, okay, great. I know a lot of people are going there. Now I've got to go figure out what article 125 is. You know, that's a great point. I hadn't thought of that one. Yeah. Just yesterday, it came up to me. Boo. All right. Next is H1 tags. No H1 tags on a given page is not desirable. Wow. Is that a double negative? I think that, yeah. Who wrote this? I don't know. But I've seen this lately a lot in the analyses that I've been giving. No H1 tags. You definitely want to have H1 tags. You want to make sure that your CMS allows you to insert H1 tags. It's in there. Stefan Spencer is the guy who wrote this, or it's Steven. Steve-Anne? Stefan? Stefan. He's the one who wrote it. I'm giving him a hard time, but this is a really good article, so we'll carry on. Yeah, H1 tags, huge in SEO. As you would know if you've been listening to our podcast, if not, go back and listen to our podcast. H1 tags are something that we focus on. And they're going to pay, SearchBot's going to pay special attention to it. Great place to put keywords. CMS doesn't allow you to do that. Drop it. Go to the next one. This one kind of goes, the third one kind of goes into the

first one. It says customizable URL structure. Yes, the default URL structure for most CMS systems is like the long session ID, article equals, blah, blah, blah, blah. You want to be able to customize that with keywords into a keyword-rich URL. And that goes back to the issue last night that I ended up fixing for myself, which was the URL was ugly. I wanted to have a custom URL feature, and it wasn't working. And just so if anyone's listening and having that problem, it was because I was using an older version of PHP. We had to upgrade to the newer version of PHP for that particular account. The other thing that we want to bring up, that I'd like to bring up about this URL structure is the fact that we debate here, often what's in the structure is dates, like year and month and potentially day, but usually it's just year and month. And we've had discussions, lots of discussions, and maybe you guys have thought about this. Do you really want your customers or the visitors to know the dates? You know, if you're a news source, and maybe you do, if you're not a news source like us, there's no real reason to have dates actually in the structure and on the side where they still are there on our blog. But because sometimes people see, you know, oh, it's 2009, so I don't really want to read it. Well, there's some still very, you know, I do that knowing that, like probably what you're going to say, there's still valuable information, but it's like, yeah, there's probably newer, better, more valuable information somewhere else. Yes. And so that might be a reason that you debate whether you want to display the date, you know, pull out that date and you don't have that issue, leave the date in and you, you know, it may serve a purpose. So think about what you're trying to accomplish and decide if you want to have dates in there. So I thought that was pretty, pretty

important. I think it's a great point. Definitely think, think hard about including the dates in your articles and in your, your URL structure. I love this one. We've, we've talked about this one a whole lot. Uh, three Oh one redirects and conical URLs. Um, explain that. So, um, cause I, I had to have it explained to me when I first read this article. I was like, what's that? Conical. Yeah. Okay. So three Oh one redirect is saying, okay. Um, the, the best example, we talk about this regularly. If you have your website, um, ewebstyle.com and the homepage is index.asp. And that's, that is what it is in our case. You can actually get to that page by leaving off the index.asp, right? So, but Google recognizes that that's two separate pages. It's ewebstyle.com and ewebstyle.com slash index.asp. So we potentially, if we are link, have people linking to both of those pages, we potentially have a spread of our Google juice across two pages and it'd be more valuable to have that put together. So what we do is we do a three Oh one redirect, uh, basically a con canonical, is that right? Yeah. Canonical. Um, so that if somebody's linking to index.asp, we tell Google, Hey, send all that Google juice to the one without the doc.asp and it's about Google juice. The same thing, say for instance, and we have this challenge in ewebstyle, currently our, um, our blog posts actually have the date in them and we've decided that we're going to pull those out. Well, people may have linked to our old entries, our old, uh, blog entries where it's got the title of the article and then the date. Well, if I change our system, then that URL will no longer work or if the system smart enough, it's even worse. If it does work and then I've got another page with a different, you know, without the date that is the same page and somebody else links to it. Now, again, my Google juice is spread across the

link with the date and the link without the date. And so really when we make that change, we're going to do a three Oh one from the link with the date, pointing it over to the link without the date. And then that Google juice gets all thrown into one spot. That's awesome. So basically for the, the new SEO or you have, you can have two homepage. You do have two homepages and almost inherently. Yes. You have the www page and the index.asp or index.html or default html just because they can have different ones. But yes, exactly right. So you, you know, you want the link juice going basically to one page. You want to redirect that. So that's extremely important and we do it here. So you should do it because we're awesome and listen to everything that I say. Everything that he says. So let's bring, is it time to bring in Captain, Captain WordPress? Captain know-it-all, Captain WordPress. Let's say Captain WordPress because he is literally Captain WordPress. The Joomla Jokester. Calling it the Joomla Jokester. He came in and just shook everything up. I was happy with my Chrome. Now I got to go back to Firefox. Oh, you're, you're going back? I don't know. I actually gave him something the other day. I don't know. He was, here he is, guys. Chuck, Chuck Lewis, Charles Lewis, also known as the SEO rapper. Thank you for joining us again today. No problem. No problem. This is my second home. Woo-hoo. That's what's up. That means that's two, four, six homes here. It's the same for us. I don't know how that math works. Thank you for laughing. Chuck. Chuck, man, you're like WordPress king. Let's talk about WordPress and SEO and some. Before you even get started, his home site, the SEO rapper, I mean, one of your sites. This is actually a full-on CMS WordPress install, WordPress site. Since we're talking WordPress, I'm going to take this time to shout out to Matt, Matt Munderweg. What's up? This has been Chuck.

How about me? We're using WordPress. All right. And if he's using Google Alerts, he should know. He'll get this eventually. That's what's up. So, SEO, WordPress, I know you know about this, like Head Start. I just, Jeremy's the one who introduced me to Head Start. Like, basically, WordPress has all these different plug-ins that are SEO friendly. And I assume you've used them and you have, would you put the Chuck stamp of approval on it? Or would you say that WordPress has the things that we've discussed? Well, I think WordPress does. Okay. I mean, because obviously it was created to compete, you know, and it's actually moving away from just being a blog platform to more of a CMS platform. Okay. And so, one of the advantages to WordPress is the option to add plug-ins. Okay. You can add plug-ins for friendly URLs. You can add plug-ins for, you know, content. You can add. Optimum title. Yeah. That I use. Okay. And so, that kind of gives you the option to tweak it how you want. Okay. So, you know, I'll co-sign WordPress. Okay. So, you would say it does allow you to do H1 tags. I don't know because I have not put an H1 tag in WordPress before. Customizable URLs. Do you have to do that specifically or is the title an H1 tag or is there a way to do it? The way WordPress works, usually the title, your page title, when creating that page becomes the actual H1. Title. Right. Oh, title tag. For that page. For the page. And then you get a content area. And in that content area, you can code it how you feel. H1s, H2s. I recently started adding H1s to our blog because, you know, we break up each of these podcasts and we get them transcribed and we break up that transcription into three entries. So, that's three good titles. So, the titles are good titles for articles. And the other day, I was like, you know, we do SEO and there's no H1 tags

in here. There's actually no alt tags in here. We do have an image. You know, a little bit of outbound linking might help a little bit. So, now it's policy to actually go in and make an H1 tag. And the H1 tag is the same as I just copy the title and stick it in there. And then the same title goes into the alt tag. So, it just gives a little bit more weight to it. You always spend more time helping doing other people's stuff than you do for yours. It's like the mechanic who drives the crappy car because he doesn't get paid to work on his own car. And what I'd say from a Joomla standpoint, everything that we have discussed, Joomla does allow you to do. It does give you H1 tags. You can have a customizable URL structure. And there was a plug-in that you told me about. Oh. What's the name of it? What's the name of it? You know it because you found it. Oh. The customizable URL structure. Yes, they can do that. Yeah, you can. It's a headache to do. But you can do it. All of these things you can do if you can find them. Yes, if you definitely can find them. From my experience, WordPress was a little more easy to find stuff. Joomla, you can definitely do it. Not as easy to find. Well, I mean, they both have, like, to give you a good example. With Joomla, for example, all these same features are available, but you have to, like you said, go in and find them. Right. With WordPress, you have to find them also. Okay. Right? You know what I mean? Because it may be in your widget editor. It could be in your template editor. It may be in your list of plug-ins, right? Okay. And so you've got to find it. And then they used to have the plug-ins used to link directly to the variables for the plug-in. Now it's under settings at the bottom. So they do

move things around every now and then, which I think is a good decision. Well, really, really, they move things around frequently. If I do have a complaint about WordPress, it would be the amount of updates. Yeah. It's like every... You can update. Just don't move stuff around. It's like another update, you know, and you know... Well, that can be good as long as they're making improvements and not just shuffling stuff around. An update. Well, it's usually an improvement. Yeah. It's usually an improvement. Problem is, most of the time, that improvement doesn't work with your plug-in. Oh. Right? Oh, yeah. And now you have to go reinstall all these plug-ins and then it's a headache. Yeah. So Matt at WordPress, step your game up. Or step it down. So you're not doing the update. Yeah. Okay. I'm talking trash, man. I've never even met Matt. Yeah, man. Matt's like, who is this dude? Shut up. I'm with you, man. I didn't say that. I'm not with him. And Paul Hanson said that. We do have a lot more to cover. So our next podcast is going to kind of continue on in this. And we'll have more. We'll have, you know, even more experience. We didn't even talk about ModX, which is another content management solution that somebody seems to be in favor of. Yes. Actually, I've got to tell you what. I've been setting up ModX this week because we've got a client. Again, we're the cleaner uppers. I've got a client this week who's got two ModX sites. He needed them moved. He doesn't know how to move them. And, you know, moving content management systems can get a little tricky because it's, you know, there's code involved. There's database involved. And so I jumped into it. And it's actually been fairly easy. It's pretty easy for me to find stuff. So, you know, I have, well, our previous experience with ModX was a little bit of a pain. But I think that's kind of the things we were running into were things that

you would run into in almost any content management system. And that is, you know, how do you tweak the existing structure? And that can be a problem with any content management system. So good stuff. Good stuff. So our next podcast, we will continue to talk about content management systems. Here, before we go, let me cover this. So five points of critical CMS features. You must be able to insert H1 tags with your CMS. You have to be able to add URLs free of tracking parameters and session IDs. You have to be able to customize your URL structure, preferably with keyword-rich URLs. You have to be able to do a 301 redirect from the Canicle, redirect to the Canicle URL. Those are four must-haves absolutely have to be able to do with your CMS, whichever CMS that you do decide. Absolutely. Did you? What he said. All right. You guys have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. We really appreciate that. Go to our Facebook page. Throw out a review, if you would. Go to, actually, our Podomatic page. That's ewebstyle.podomatic.com. And throw in a comment there on one of our podcasts. Maybe your favorite podcast. Choose your favorite podcast and go back and say, this is my favorite podcast. Nothing else. Well, maybe a URL so that we can hit you back. And also follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash ewebstyle. This has been podcast number 81. We appreciate you listening. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. I'm Paul Hanson. I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye. He's there for a second. I said, you're Charles Lewis. Charles. I'm Blake. Bye-bye for now. I don't know.