Concrete and Search Engine Compatibility

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I just came back from a meeting where my client was not very happy with me. They got another company to do an analysis on the site and basically they have come down to the conclusion that concrete5 is not a good platform for SEO and that actually concrete5 is affecting their ranking in google.

Has anyone experienced this type of feedback does anyone know of a way I can improve how concrete5 "speaks" to google.

Look forward to your responses.

agentorange
 
adajad replied on at Permalink Reply
adajad
Different companies and so called SEO specialists look on different things and will all come with complaints since they want to sell you something. I have been climbing steadily in search engines since I started using c5 and can't complain one bit in the SEO friendliness.

Start off by having a look at Julias How-To from last month: http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/editors/seo-and-conc...
JohntheFish replied on at Permalink Reply
JohntheFish
Try Googling for 'Lily Bulbs' and see where H.W.Hyde&Son comes up. (In the UK it is reliably no1. In the USA its usually 2 or 3 down the list) The site has been reliably scoring well on Google since converting to C5 almost a year ago. (It scored almost as well on the previous CMS software, which used frames for navigation, so was considerably less search engine friendly.)

Just to prove it is possible.

My main point is that as long as your theme is not particularly hostile to searching, search results depend on other factors which have little to do with C5. Things like: Good content. Good keywords (in the content, not in keywords metadata). Consistency. Popular click through.

http://www.concrete5.org/about/showcase/business/hwhyde-co-uk/...
agentorange replied on at Permalink Reply
agentorange
Hi Guys Thanks for your reply

I was a bit overwhelmed in the meeting and to be honest I have delayed on some elements of the site so I didn't want to claim things without making sure. I hate being on the back foot...

I also checked with a online marketing company that we deal with regularly and they also suggested it has very little to do with the CMS system and more the content etc. Been investigating more and checking their content and they have really bombarded some pages with keywords that are not even relevant.

My job also did not involve SEO optimisation I just made sure my template was clean in terms of coding and built correctly and that the design met their brief.

Busy putting my report together on what they should do so we will see what they say after tomorrow... sigh
synlag replied on at Permalink Reply 1 Attachment
synlag
Hi,

I'm sure you ran the sitemap.xml job at your dashboard, just wanted to make sure ;)
You might add your site to the google webmaster tools and check if you probably can rewrite the old page aliases to the new ones at your concrete5 site via 301 permanent redirect, so the page rank wont get lost.
That said, you can try the build in audit tool in webkit browsers, to see if there are performance things to optimize.
See the attachement, might help.

BW
Ron