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SEO Benefits of Using a (Good) CMS

November 20th, 2009 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

Google announced another update to the search engine results pages. They’re now including information about a result’s location in a site’s hierarchy, rather than merely showing the page’s URL.

Here’s an example of what the new results will look like. The new feature isn’t yet live for everyone but Google says we’ll all see this feature within the next few days.

So what does this have to do with using a content management system (CMS)?

Well, if your site has many pages, providing the search user with context about the page they’re considering clicking might actually help convince them to click on your listing. Or, they may see that they really want to click on the listing’s parent page or category.

Using a CMS can help you ensure that the websites you maintain and/or build are structured in a way that Google can easily decipher site organization. Tweak CMS, for example, uses a parent-child organizational structure to ensure that your site fully leverages the sitemaps protocol (very helpful for SEO) as well as providing an automated method for generating breadcrumb (crumbtrail) navigation. Google’s announcement indicates that breadcrumb navigation is a key factor in determining whether they can include this new feature on a given site’s listing.