Using the Page Details to Help Your SEO

When you create a new page in QuantumCMS or just edit an existing page, the Details tab contains four fields that are important for any SEO strategy — even the lack of one.

1. Title
2. URL Alias
3. Navigation Text
4. Summary

These four fields allow you to get important keywords and key phrases into your page in more places than just the big content area.

Title

The text you enter here is the part of the page that typically appears right above the content, telling users what the page is about. This text is rather important because we set that to use the h1 tag, giving it the most prominent position in the page structure, and helping search engine spiders understand that it defines the page. The title also gets used in the title tag of the page, which is used by search engines, in conjunction with the h1, to further rank the page for key terms. This is the same text used in the search results when users search on content within your site. Given the importance of this text, we ask for this field first.

URL Alias

The text in this field is automatically created from whatever content you enter into the Title field. QuantumCMS automatically strips the spaces and other special characters so you don't have to. The content that appears in this field makes up the address of the page, in conjunction with the address of each page above. These "human readable addresses" not only benefit users by providing an address that they can understand, but search engines see the words in the address and use them to rank the page, comparing them to the title and h1 tags of the page when factoring its value. As a user, you can always override this simply by typing in different text.

Navigation Text

The text in this field is also automatically created from the text you enter in the Title field. The text you enter here is used in the site map, the breadcrumb links, and most importantly in the site navigation menus. We do this because sometimes the title of a page is too long to fit into the navigation bar and still be useful, but we don't think you should have to make that trade off for your SEO plan. For example, if you have a page named "About Company Name," you may be satisfied with showing it in the navigation as simply "About." What is important to know here is that search engine spiders look at the text used to link one page to another, and factor the words in that text toward the overall page rank for a key phrase. If your page is about cupcakes, you should try to always link to it using the word "cupcakes," and this feature helps you do that.

Summary

We always tell our clients that they should fill this fiield out for every page. This simple 255-character plain-text long field allows you to enter an abstract of the page that we use throughout the site. We display this content in search results for a page and use it as a title attribute in the navigation links throughout the site and in the site map (which displays a tooltip for many users). This associates even more key terms with a hyperlink, and therefore with the page you are linking. In addition, on many sites we feed it into the meta description tag, which while NOT used for ranking a page, is often used by Google to show the abstract of a page. If your site has a news index, a document index, or displays content using the Linked Pages feature, then we also use the Summary as the abstract of the page in those views, providing even more opportunities for search engines to pull in your content.

Recap

QuantumCMS offers you many ways to expose your content to the search engines, and provides it to those search engines using best practices based on 15 years of research and proven results. If all you do is enter the Title and Summary content, you have created at least fourteen (14) different ways to share those two (2) pieces of content per page — more if your site has additional features that share content. Please do take the time to get some good words in those fields.

As always, if you have questions about QuantumCMS and SEO/SEM efforts, please don't hesitate to contact me directly.