Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 5

Watching Your Backend: Content Management System Troubles

In This Chapter

• Meeting the content management system (CMS)
• Avoiding the problems caused by dynamic URLs and session IDs
• Selecting a good CMS
• Making your CMS work with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts
• Using hosted e-commerce solutions effectively
• Helping search engines read a website built completely in JavaScript

Behind every web page viewed in a browser is a host of technologies and services known as the backend that work to make the star performers look good. Just as a Hollywood blockbuster has a crew of people supporting the actors, your website has servers, code, shopping carts, and, most important, your content management system, which all must perform at their best to turn out a superior experience for your customers. A web content management system (CMS) is a software program that helps simplify website creation. A CMS uses a database (such as your database of products, if you have a store) and publishes web pages in an orderly, consistent fashion. One thing a CMS can do is pull information from your database and build pages dynamically, which means the pages don’t actually exist until someone asks for them. If you have 10,000 products, you don't want to build 10,000 individual pages by hand. Instead, you can use a CMS to build them dynamically on the fly.

In this chapter, you discover some common problems that may occur when using a CMS to build your website. For all their advantages, content ...