While this is a common feature of the majority of content management systems these days, if your current CMS doesn’t allow you to modify certain on-page elements, it may be time to start shopping around. Each page within your site should be crafted and optimized with the overall goal of higher rankings and increased traffic in mind. Here are a few elements to check:
Title Tags
Title tags are probably the easiest, yet most important, element of any page to modify with most Content Management Systems. Each page within your site should have a well-crafted title tag that you (or your web developer) have written. Alternatively, in the case of larger sites, or e-commerce sites with lots of products, the content management system should be able to help generate very-friendly tags based upon the page or product name and the overall brand of the website.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions help increase the click-through rate for search engine listings. Any given CMS should allow you to modify each page’s meta description within your site. These are great places for a few quick sentences involving key phrases you’re targeting and a call to action to entice the user to click.
H1 Tags
A good CMS will allow you to simply highlight and style any text within your site with an H, or heading, tag. An H1 tag should be thought of as the headline of the page and should directly relate to the content on that particular page. Styling this text should happen automatically, making the job of the content creator much easier.
File Names and Alt Tags
Within your CMS, you’re going to be uploading content. This content should retain the original file name once upload (assuming that you named your images and videos with applicable key phrases). Also, when inserting an image onto a page, the option to add Alt Image Text should be presented. This text will help your odds of being relevant for Google Image searches.
Automated Elements
The elements that should be automated within your CMS for on-page SEO purposes are things like the URL structure, XML Sitemap, and robots.txt file. The URL that is generated for any given page should be friendly, without creating session IDs, or other unnecessary snippets. The XML Sitemap and robots.txt file are pretty much strictly for search engines and automatically generated by your CMS.
There are other elements of on-page SEO that are important (content creation, internal linking structure, etc.), but those are at the heart of every CMS. The elements listed above are extremely important and shouldn’t be a daunting task if you’ve chosen the right CMS for the job. If you're a bit new to SEO, feel free to download our SEO Whitepaper free of charge.