Become findable online with MODX, the SEO CMS.
Setting up a website online is of course totally awesome, but what if you still don't get found? Search engine optimisation is the key to success, looking at three different factors: content, technology and authority. This makes SEO not only the number one priority of content managers, but developers certainly have an important role to play in your organisation's online findability. Find out how MODX helps you get found online, so you attract more visitors to your platform and therefore have a better chance of getting new leads or clients.
In this blog, you will learn:
- What SEO is
- 5 key takeaways for SEO
- How MODX content managers helps with SEO
- How MODX developers helps with SEO
What is SEO?
Being findable in online search engines is essential in this digital age. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or search engine optimisation, is optimising your online platform so that the user experience improves. After all, you should always build a platform with your users in mind, and one of those users is a search engine like Google. With SEO, you make sure that search engines understand your content better and thus can in turn present it better for you in their search results.
There are an unprecedented number of ranking factors that Google sorts its search results by, yet these can be divided into roughly three categories that are inextricably linked: content, authority and technology.
Content
Sharing interesting and relevant content is perhaps the most important factor in getting your website ranked. Besides making you more findable by search engines like Google with well-written content, visitors also immediately see when content is good and quickly make the decision to stay on your website or leave it. And if it is really top-notch, they will even want to do their best to attract more visitors to your page.
Content can be anything. From long and extensive pillar pages to specific landing pages: content includes web texts, blog articles, case studies, forums, infographics, reports, review pages and even social media posts. Your newsletters and e-mails also fall under content, but you can only rank on these if you publish them to the public by, for example, creating a web version of your newsletter and having it indexed by Google too.
To score with content, it is essential that you know who your target audience is and what they are searching for. At every step of the experience journey. Find out what questions, problems or opportunities for improvement each persona has in each step of the experience journey. Think about what keywords they use to get answers to their questions, and create content that answers them directly. Keep in mind that people who know more about a topic search differently than someone new to the business, and respond accordingly.
With our experience journey framework, we'll give you a hand in coming up with the right content at each step of the customer journey. Download it here.
Try to create new content and offer that which no one else is offering. Of course, you don't always have to reinvent the wheel, but make sure you don't blindly copy text from other websites and use it on your website. Always try to put your own spin on a story to create unique content. This way, you will also ensure that you do not create duplicate content and thus receive penalty points from Google.
And when you have written your beautiful texts, don't forget to structure them with headings and links. Your visitors should be able to easily navigate to and through your page and scan it, so they get to the right piece of content quickly. And finally, to be found well: deploy the meta title and description to optimise the search result in Google.
Technology
The more technically strong a website's findability, the better it becomes. Since 'content is king' for search engines, everything between <html> and </html> should be treated with utmost care.
As content is king for search engines, everything between <html> and </html> should be treated with utmost care.
So use semantic code and proper 'site markup' to help search engines understand what is on a page. Search engines in turn use this to display your content in a nice and useful way in its search results, such as in a featured snippet. This in turn helps your organisation attract more visitors.
To become readable by Google, you also need to make sure it is suitable for every device and functions correctly. 64% of Google searches are done via mobile1, it is therefore essential that your website functions on this device. In addition, Google now indexes your website based on the mobile version. Then, of course, you want everything to look spick and span. With Google's mobile-friendly test you can see how the Googlebot sees your website. This may still be different from how you see it because, for example, the Googlebot does not see images or does not support that particular JavaScript feature.
In addition to readable code, readable URLs are also essential for your findability. So don't use URLs like:
https://sterc.com/nl/map1/2022...
Instead, use readable words so that URLs are descriptive and easier to understand:
https://sterc.com/nl/kennis/bl...
Aside from being good for your findability, URLs are also shown in search results. That makes it all the more important to create a readable URL.
Speed is also becoming an increasingly important part of Google's ranking factor. With smart code, you ensure that Google can crawl and index the page quickly. In addition, optimising images - often the heaviest element to be found on a page - ensures that your pages load quickly and so you don't miss out on interesting visitors.
Also, optimising images - often the heaviest element to be found on a page - ensures that your pages load quickly and so you don't miss out on interesting visitors.
Also, optimising images is a key part of Google's ranking factor.
So make sure the website is suitable for any device, keep the code light, use semantic code and make sure there are no weird twists in the code. That's how you create fast, secure, user-friendly and naturally findable platforms
.
Authority
Authority is entirely about your popularity: how many websites link to your site and how relevant are these links? This is important as it shows search engines and other users that you are trustworthy.
Authority
Getting links to your website is not an easy job. However, there are a few tips that will help you build more authority for your website:
- Create relevant content: As we said earlier, relevant content is essential to be found, not only by users and search engines, but also by other website owners. They in turn can use interesting parts of your content for their own sites, and then link back to your website.
- Build a healthy link profile: Don't just post links on your website without knowing whether they are reliable and relevant or not. In addition, don't just let any random website link to your site either. While this can work very occasionally, it is more likely to lead to penalty points from Google. Or worse: this page or even your entire domain will no longer be indexed, making you invisible in Google's search results. So go for relevance and not spam (quality over quantity).
- Use relevant anchor text: If you link text, you can set anchor text that provides a description of the page you are linking to. If you have multiple links linking to the same page with a variation of a word or phrase, that page has a higher chance of ranking for those words. Note: do not use the exact same link text over and over again, this can again appear unreliable to search engines.
SEO is thus super comprehensive! By organising your code smartly, giving your content a logical layout and being relevant, you make sure you are findable by the people who are looking for what you have to offer.
5 key takeaways for SEO
SEO obviously goes into an awful lot of depth, and Google is constantly tweaking its rules and ranking factors. So we don't have a complete guide to help you appear at the top of search results 100% sure (sorry!). Nevertheless, there are a few rules of thumb you should always keep in mind that will help you stay on top:
- Don't stuff your content with keywords. Use them in moderation; the texts should always remain readable for both Google and your readers.
- Keep a logical structure: place a descriptive title at the top of the page, set as the H1 that appears only once on the page. The sub-headings and sub-sub-headings (H2 and H3) that follow can be placed several times in the page.
- Create readable and understandable URLs.
- Use light and smart code to build your website and don't use inline styling. Semantic HTML5 is used within MODX, so everything is easily understood by both humans and search engines.
- Write relevant content that is concise and up-to-date.
If you think about it, people will probably benefit more from these improvements than search engines. So that is what you should always keep in mind: it is people who ultimately buy something from you, not search engines. So make your platform relevant and findable for your target audience.
MODX & SEO
MODX focuses strongly on optimising for search engines. It is therefore a true SEO CMS, both for the technical side and the content side of SEO. With handy MODX SEO Extras and scripts, MODX helps content managers keep meta content and links in good order, increase pagespeed by automatically compressing images and thus increasing website speed. Because MODX gives you full control over every element and tag within your website and websites are programmed with semantic HTML5/CSS3 code, your code gets more relevance. And this, in turn, ranks better within search engines.
MODX SEO CMS for content managers
MODX makes SEO for content managers a lot easier by making content easily manageable, providing tips on how to improve your meta content, automatically creating 301 redirects when you change the page url and compressing images.
SEO Suite 2.0
For MODX users, we've created a super handy all-in-one MODX Extra: MODX SEO Suite 2.0. This merges the previous MODX Extras SEO Pro, SEO Tab and SEO Suite together, allowing MODX to help you structure your texts, check SEO criteria, let you influence indexability and show a preview of your search result.
Discover more about this powerful SEO Extra? Discover SEO Suite 2.0 at this MODX Extra page.
Meta content
Within the CMS, you can easily customise the meta title and meta description. Using focus keywords, SEO Suite checks whether you use them in your meta title and description, and the character count keeps track of the right length. This way, you make sure your search result in Google looks tiptop.
Influencing indexability
Determine which pages should and should not be indexed by Google and included in the sitemap. For example, while you can publish pages, you can use one page for SEO and have it indexed by Google, while next to it you use a page with almost the same text for search engine advertising (SEA). By not having the latter indexed by Google, you do not suffer from duplicate content and Google does not give you any penalty points.
301 redirects
As soon as you move a page within the website, rename it or take it offline, it gets a new URL and visitors end up on a 404 page. SEO Suite 2.0 automatically creates a 301 redirect when you change the URL, and when the page is moved or taken offline, SEO Suite immediately looks for a matching page. As soon as one is found, a 301 redirect is immediately created. Should multiple options be found, SEO Suite 2.0 leaves the choice up to you. This way, visitors always get to the right content, and at the same time you don't lose the SEO value and authority you have built up on a particular page. This value is transferred to the new URL by a 301 redirect, with minimal loss of value (+/- 10%).
MODX scripts for pagespeed
In addition to our MODX Extra SEO Suite 2.0, we have also created several scripts that improve findability. Some examples of such scripts include automatically resizing images to the image format WebP developed by Google. This file format compresses images and thus improves the loading speed of your website. An important ranking factor of Google. Through this script, you can upload any file format and it will be automatically resized to this small file format.
Another script we created is the one that automatically optimises images for responsive web design. Images that are uploaded are often not 100% optimised, even if you have set this up in an image editing programme like Photoshop. This script checks all images every hour and automatically optimises them in the best possible way.
MODX SEO CMS for developers
Within MODX, you have 100% control over every element and tag within a page. This way, you and MODX ensure that the website is not overloaded with unnecessary code and new SEO techniques can be applied quickly. Because this smart CMS doesn't overload your website with unnecessary code, the search engine doesn't have to spend a long time crawling through the code, but gets to the most important criterion of the website in no time: the content.
How does speed affect your website and how can MODX help you with this? Find out in our blog on MODX and speed.
In addition, MODX platforms are developed with semantic HTML5/CSS3 code. This gives every word in the code a lot more relevance than websites built in old CMSs full of illogical, non-semantic code.
Naturally, you shouldn't think SEO is a piece of cake, even if you use MODX. But MODX does make it a lot easier! On the front end for content managers and marketers, MODX helps by making and keeping content manageable, lets you manage links and gives tips too. On the backend, it helps our developers create a customised website, allowing us to make each platform fully compatible with our clients' target audiences. Want to know more about this powerful CMS? Download our MODX guide or request a MODX demo directly.