Symphony.

A client currently has a blog in Wordpress, and I’m converting the site into Symphony. They have been told that a Wordpress blog is really good for SEO, and would like to keep it in Wordpress, as it’s part of the actual site, I suggested to make the blog in Symphony, but they are concerned it won’t be as SEO friendly.

Could anyone offer any words of wisdom in this area? Is a bog in Symphony just as SEO friendly as in Wordpress?

Cheers.

Could anyone offer any words of wisdom in this area? Is a bog in Symphony just as SEO friendly as in Wordpress?

Yes. The technology choice really doesn’t matter — the same HTML markup can be output whether it’s Wordpress or Symphony (or anything else). Symphony can do all the things that contribute to SEO: clean URLs that can contain keywords, the ability to add meta data to entries, the ability to use semantic headings within your content.

But don’t forget that SEO is as much to do with the code behind your pages as it is to do with the content of your pages, and the ways in which you’re linking to these pages. This transcends technology.

Great response Nick, cheers! I wondered how Wordpress could be more SEO friendly, but I’m guessing it just because it automatically outputs meta data.

I don’t think Wordpress without an SEO plugin outputs the greatest meta data. But those are easy to come by. I’m with Nick, its mostly about how you set it up. If they’re pretty concerned about SEO, then you’d better do a pretty good job at setting up the site with meta tags, h1 titles, alt tags, etc.

Thats what I thought, it’s about how the output code is, and not the actual system. I know the basics of SEO so it’ll be fine.

Without looking, am I right in thinking I can create a field in Symphony on each page titled “Meta Description” for example, and then use the master.xsl to output that meta data so it will change for each page, or is there a better way to do that?

create a field in Symphony on each page

One way of doing it. Depends how your content is structured. If you’ve got a blog and a section named “Blog Posts” then each post might have its own “meta description” textarea, if you want each post to have its own unique metadata.

There is also an extension somewhere that allows you to define metadata and attach them to specific URLs (using regular expressions). This keeps you metadata separate from your entries, so you end up writing it against URLs rather than entries.

It depends entirely on how you choose to structure your content. But I usually do what you’ve described and it works well.

That second option sounds better I think. I will have for look at it! Cheers for the quick responses!

I’d actually go so far as to say that Symphony was a more SEO-friendly CMS than WordPress ever was. Why? Because with Symphony you have a much more finite control of your content and how it’s presented on the page. Meta-data is only one part of the whole SEO beast. Your page content plays an even bigger role.

For example, does WordPress always create a proper ALT tag on your images? Nope. Can you make Symphony do that? Yeah, pretty easily, whether it’s user-defined in the code or something that you do in your XSLT. ALT tags are great for SEO. Then there’s control over the markup, the ability to use micro-formats…

I am wondering… how does google deal with individual entry views, based on url parameters? I don’t think google indexes this, cause the page only comes to existence when the url parameter is populated…

am i right?

Technically, Google treats every URL as an individual page. In theory…

• www.yoursite.com
• www.yoursite.com/index.html
• yoursite.com
• yoursite.com/index.html

…Are all, technically, individual pages. Google knows to figure it out but doesn’t always get it perfect.

That’s why they recommend using the Canonical link. Google (and other search engines, I believe) know to use this as the actual URL irregardless of what the one in the browser is. That way you can have www.mysite.com/search/some-phrase-here/ always rank in search results as www.mysite.com/search/.

The beauty of this is that the same pages always rank as the same page, even if the URL changes but the content doesn’t.

Thanks,

But i don’t understand how google can index the dynamic pages, since the page gets outputted based on the population of the url parameter. This means the page only comes to existence after populating this url parameter. So google can never know of it’s existence, besides from crawling url’s to this page in e.g menu items. If there are no such references it seems to me it’s impossible to crawl and index these pages.

If there are no such references it seems to me it’s impossible to crawl and index these pages.

Correct, this is true of any web page, dynamic or not.

You need links to these dynamic pages for Google to index them… So, if you have a page with a link to one of your dynamic pages, it will be indexed.

@designermonkey - thats good to know! Also had a look at that Regular Expressions extension, looks perfect for controlling meta data for pages!

A new Symphony site is soon to be born ;)

Unless it’s behind a login, what part of your site are you worried won’t be indexed? There should be no part of your site that isn’t accessible from some other part. The only issue is areas that are found via a form-submission, which you don’t need indexed in the first place.

@dougoftheabaci - I build a template that populates a dynamic blogspot xml via url parameter; eg: http://www.xpresszo.com/blog/googlewebmastercentral/ So the page gets formed after you enter the blogspot name in the url. I don’t think these pages can get indexed. cause there are no links to them.

Entirely true. The simplest solution is so create an XML sitemap of every domain created so Google can crawl them.