Written by:
10/3/2007 11:42 AM 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is kind of a mystic art that is practiced among web consultants these days. Much like alchemists of the past who toiled in their labs and sought to transform ordinary materials into gold, SEO promises to transform your ordinary web pages into higher search engine rankings, increased traffic and, hopefully, to your own pot of gold.

While some SEO specialists engage in questionable tactics, in an effort to game the system (with equally questionable results), it is an established fact that you should carefully pay attention to the content and structure of your web page. Otherwise, you're unnecessarily punishing yourself with lower rankings.

I'm not going to presume to have the answers for optimal rankings. You can find those techniques elsewhere. However, I do want to make you aware of some of the tools XMod provides you in your quest for web gold.

Page Structure

Most people will agree that loading your HTML down with FONT tags, TABLEs used for layout purposes, and other web 1.0 techniques will harm your ranking or, at the least, make it more difficult for the search engines to determine what is important on your page. So, clean XHTML is important.

Preferably you should use "semantic markup" where the HTML you use helps to describe or give context to the content rather than being used for styling. For example, use an ordered list instead of a table or series of lines separated by a line break. Don't use FONT tags. Instead, use CSS classes and stylesheets for styling.

While it's not always easy to follow strict semantic markup, the more you can do, the better you, the search engines, and your visitors will be able to digest and understand your page and its content. Beyond SEO, semantic markup is also a boon for visually impaired individuals browsing your site with screen readers.

So, how does XMod help you create semantic markup?  XMod's Detail View template type has always allowed you to use whatever HTML you need. Version 5, though, now includes the new Repeater template type. This type of template provides you with complete control over the HTML that is generated by XMod for list views. This means that, instead of your list of books being formatted with an HTML table, you can use the HTML unordered list tag (or ordered list) to give the content more meaning.Even if you're using the List and Grid template types, you can still improve your HTML by using CSS styling and adding items like "alt" tags to your images.

Meta Tags

XMod also provides you with an additional tag that can aid your SEO efforts - the xmod:metatags tag. You see, one of the problems with dynamic websites that rely heavily on content stored within a database, is that they use "generic" pages into which the content is injected. This makes it much easier to maintain a site, but you lose the specificity that you have with static HTML pages. One obvious area that you lose is the ability to change the title of the page to make, say, the headline of the news article being displayed.

The title is an important piece of information a search engine (and your users) rely on. Additionally, search engines (to varying degrees) also utilize the page's description and keywords. In static HTML pages, you would add these as Meta tags. They don't display in the page, but they are used by search engines to help describe and categorize the content of that page. Dynamic pages, because they inject their content into a generic page, aren't able to modify these values.

That's where XMod's MetaTags tag comes in. It allows you to specify the Title, Description, and Keywords for each page - right within your template. You can even choose to append values onto the existing title/description/keywords. So, all your site's pages could start with the title "MySite" and XMod would allow you to append something to it. A news site might append "::Top Stories::The Fed Cuts Key Interest Rate" resulting in "MySite::Top Stories:: The Fed Cuts Key Interest Rate" as the page's title. The same can be done for keywords (and description). You could have some default keywords for your site, that show up on every page such as "news, U.S., Financial"  and for your rate-cut story, append "Federal Reserve, interest rate, Bernanke".

You can use the MetaTags tag in list and detail templates. See the help file for more information on this useful tag.

Regardless of whether you choose to use the MetaTags tag, you should consider moving toward more sematic markup when possible and separating markup from style with CSS stylesheets. You should also provide a default value for the Description and Keywords fields for your site. You can do this by going to the Site Settings page under the Admin menu.

The Future

The web is always changing. Search Engine Optimization techniques change as well. We've designed XMod to be flexible enough to handle those changes. If you have ideas and suggestions (ethical techniques please) that would help you and other XMod users improve their rankings, I'd love to hear them. If you have ideas for how we can enhance XMod to better meet your SEO (and other) needs, I'm always eager to hear them too.

Thanks for your continued support of XMod.

Kelly

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