A hot topic these days is the maturation of social media sites and how they are changing the way we communicate on the web.  The means to generate buzz about your business has never been more available.  Old school business executives don’t appear to be big fans of them, but the attention they are getting most certainly cannot be ignored.

The question you need to be asking yourself is, How can I utilize social media sites to help market my business and generate some buzz about my products and services?  To answer that you first need to know who they are and what they do.

SEOmoz has put together a great article outlining a few of the leading social media sites and how they can help you to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message.

The SMC gives you the tools needed to put the pieces in place to “Market your Brand & Control Your Message”.  What you do to get the word out is a whole new project.

A soon to be released feature in the Site Management Console (SMC) will allow web site admins to control the text contained in the page URL, which is essentially the page name and path.  This feature is a result of tremendous pressure from our partners and many SMC clients who depend on Search Engine (Google, MSN, Yahoo!) traffic to succeed.  If SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not a critical piece in your web strategy, you should think about addressing it soon.

I’ve recently been testing this new function on SMCing.com, and it has gotten me thinking about how friendly the SMC is for SEO related tasks.  The Site Management Console (SMC) is one of the few Content Management Systems I have seen that is truly a helping hand for the SEO professional.

1. Site Maps – Site maps provide a means for users to see an entire overview of a web site, and all the pages included.  You can think of a site map the same way you think of a table of contents in a book.  Site maps also provide an excellent path for search engine spiders to crawl your site.  Particularly with sites that use flash, javascript, or AJAX in their navigation, a site map allows the search engine to index pages that it otherwise wouldn’t be able to.  Your site map is automatically generated as you add, update, and remove pages from your SMC web site.
2. Meta Data - On the Page Properties for each SMC page there are fields to provide critical meta data for page title, description, and keywords.  This meta data is automatically placed in the header of the published page and essentially provides the search engine spider with a taste of what can be expected on that page.  The page title and description are of particular importance in that they are included in the search algorithm and can also be displayed on the Search Results Pages, describing to the user what the page is about.  The page title and description meta tags are often times the difference between a person clicking to your site over another!
3. Static versus Dynamic Content - Static content can be described as non-changing content whereas dynamic content would be considered content that changes or is provided on demand.  Both have advantages in SEO, and the SMC allows you to capitalize on each of them.  A dynamic web site generally stores page content in a database.  Search engine spiders can have trouble indexing page content stored in a database, particularly if several parameters are involved.  While SMC page content is stored in a database, the Release function will pull all the content out and create a nice static page that the search engine can read.
4. Keywords in Page URLs – Keyword density is one of the most important factors determining where your page ranks in the search engine results.  If you are able to organize the keywords you are targeting in what the search engines consider to be “important” places, you will receive a higher ranking for that keyword.  Important places include domain names, directory names, page names, link text, image alt tags, and header tags, just to name a few.  It just so happens the first 3 items in that list make up the page URL (www.domain.com/directory/page_name.html), and if placed properly can be very influential in your page rank.
5. Template Management – The Site Management Console (SMC) uses templates primarily to separate designers from content providers.  Page templates also allow the designer to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control the layout and design of a page.  By using CSS in your design templates, you are able to move relevant content to the top of the page and sometimes even make note of its importance (h1, h2, etc.).
6. Broken Links – Because all navigation links are generated by the SMC engine, your chances of being penalized by the search engines for broken links are minimal with the SMC.  Anytime you can automate a process, you are minimizing the chance for error by taking the human element out of the equation.
7. Fresh Content – Although an obvious attribute of a content management system, not many people realize that fresh content is an important element of the search engine algorithm.  If you can keep your content fresh, not only will users continue to come back to your site, the new content will score points with the search engines. 

As you can see, the SMC simplifies several of the important steps needed to optimize your web site for the search engines.  The more Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tasks the SMC can handle, the less time you will need to achieve the results you are expecting with your web site.

Stay tuned for more on this subject as we continue to provide tools in this area.

Was curious to see if anyone had created a template to generate a site map that can be submit to Google? Sounds like the site map protocol was built to accomodate the big 3, but not sure on that one. More info on the protocol format (XML) can be found at Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Is this something that every site should have, or is it only needed for sites that have content that is not easily accessible by the spiders? Not sure if there is an advantage to submitting your site map to the SE’s, but I would guess you get quicker results if anything.