The little secret about Search Engine Optimization

Your average Hippo customer isn't stupid. She's smart. Let's call her Paula. I like that name. Paula. Now let's say Paula is a web analyst and works for a large non profit organization. And because she's smart, she's migrating to Hippo CMS 7. Before she did this, she read some extensive reports on SEO. Her company even hired an SEO consultant to verify her website. But she also noticed a lot of Hippo websites got the highest rankings.

She asked me why. Did I know a little secret perhaps? My answer is yes. I do have a little secret for Paula...

But first I will tell you exactly what Paula knows. So here it goes.

Paula knows

Human Readable URL's are important. Luckily she got it out of the box in Hippo CMS.

Paula knows where the description text in her Google search results comes from. See picture below. Better yet, she knows how she can easily manipulate it in her own Hippo CMS.

A friend of Paula told her about a thing called a sitemap. Although search engines won't promise you they will use it, it is pretty nice if they do: giving visitors an overview of your website in search results. See picture below. The Hippo forge has a nice sitemap plugin using the sitemap standard. The installation is easy. That's why Paula has it now.

Keywords

Things started to get a bit messier with a discussion about keywords. Paula knows it can be a lot of work to add well chosen meta keywords to your pages. She used to give the editors guidelines to try and match all the important search queries in Google; adding keywords for higher search rankings. The editors had entered them extensively in their old CMS and I didn't want to migrate them, for they weren't very helpful at all. Even worse, they were always the same.

Why don't you migrate them? She asked. Google likes them, I read it in my report by the SEO consultants.

So I explained her what a nice job it must be, being an SEO consultant. It seems you can basically write whatever you want. Why? The search ranking algorithm isn't public. So a bit of the mystery remains. I'm not saying meta keywords will hurt your search results. But they won't help you either.
Don't believe me? Check this guy's video:
Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

So don't spend your time on keyword optimization for external search engines. Rather spend it on keywords for use within your own website. For example in your own search engine. Try making sure the list of keywords in your article is short and relevant. Then people will find what they are looking for faster and you can influence your website's search results. But searching within your own website is a different topic altogether. I might write about that another time.

Link farms

Very important is the amount of linking between you and other websites. If you link to a normal relevant website and they link back, it's pretty good news for your search results. However a link farming doesn't work. That is bad news for your ranking. Broken links on your website don't help you either, so luckily Hippo CMS has a lot of tooling for that.

Performance matters

Paula didn't know performance mattered for search engines. It does. Check this page by Google about it.

I'm glad speed matters. I like fast websites. And others do too! It will get give your visitors a better feeling of usability. Higher performance leads to more page views. People return more often to fast website. Some people argue it's the most important feature of your website. Anyhow. I'm glad Hippo can provide you with lightning speed.

Nice, nice, nice, but now I want the secret

So you're wondering why Hippo websites rank as high as they do? What is the secret? Is it about all the rules applied above? Partly.

The real secret is your content. There's no smart technical feature giving you high rankings without having relevant content people like. So the amount of pages with nice relevant articles is the little secret I'll give away. And that's exactly what editors in Hippo CMS can focus on. A search term in the title or introduction is more important then a search term in the body. But you don't have to tell people that. They do that already.

And by the way. Paula is very happy and is getting high search results. Are you next?

All characters and events in this blog — even those based on real people — are entirely fictional.