SEO Tycoon

**Mackovision** · 02-02-2007, 03:40 PM

I've got a client who's switching his site over to a CMS, and wants all the material and content optimized for search engines. Now besides have alt tags on images, isn't most of the seo done in the coding of the pages? Since I'm not building and coding the CMS, what else can be done?

**vangogh** · 02-02-2007, 04:04 PM

Not at all. Most of the seo will take place off the page in the form of links pointing back to the page.

I'm just guessing here, but my guess is you're client has 0 knowledge of seo and has some very unrealistic expectations about it. There's no way I could attempt to explain everything there is about seo here so I would suggest spending some time at least learning the basics. Read through the forums here and follow some of the links in the threads to other sources.

As far as what you need to do right away for the client:

When the pages are moved to the new CMS it's possible the file names will change. Ideally keep them the same, but even if the extension changes from .html to .php then you have a new page. If those file names change in any way you need to use a 301 (permanent) redirect from the old page to the new page to let search engines know they are the same page.

You'll want to make sure the CMS is writing good page titles or write them manually yourself.

Some CMSs can put up barriers to getting a site crawled and indexed. It depends on the CMS since seo considerations have only recently been incorporated in them. If the CMS the client is wanting to use has these barriers they need to be fixed.

Alt attributes have very little to do with seo. Some possibly, but not like you're thinking.

My best suggestion is really to spend more time learning and understanding seo. There's a lot you can do to a site that uses a CMS.

**chrishirst** · 02-08-2007, 10:22 AM

SEO is done on the content the CMS uses to produce the pages NOT in the coding, provided the system producing the pages does not make it a problem to edit the important and useful page elements there should not be an issue with whatever technology it is built with.