Introduction
In a world where Google searches decide a website’s success, Craft CMS is an outstanding choice. Hiring a Craft CMS developer is your first step in unlocking a new vista.
In a world where WordPress is the most preferable CMS, with a market share of 30% websites, Craft CMS breaks the monotony by bringing in out-of-the-box solutions.
So, amongst confused business owners, you’ll find many of them looking for a stark comparison between the two CMS platforms. Hiring a Craft CMS or a WordPress developer depends on what features you’re looking for in your website and how much you’re ready to invest.
After the website is up-and-running comes the tricky part of having it rank on the SERPs. It is well known that there are essentially two way of making that happen;
- Following the organic way – SEO
- Following the paid way – Paid Ads (SEM)
WordPress SEO is pretty easy to understand and carry out. But there are a plethora of WordPress websites, and even the crawlers love the taste of something new.
So, in the list of to-be-indexed webpages, Craft webpages stand out and are slightly more preferred by the crawlers.
Craft CMS + SEO = A Harmonious Friendship
Craft CMS doesn’t eliminate the human-factor while considering SEO activities for a website, making it very accurate and different from the automatically programmed CMS platforms.
In the era of automation, SEO remains a volatile and human-friendly space. Every SEO activity revolves around understanding the mindset of your niches and formulate a strategy accordingly.
Amidst all the automation, we tend to forget that performing good SEO involves understanding user intent, creating content to fulfill user queries, and promoting the content on multiple platforms.
And Craft’s flexibility is the talk of the town, better yet – the world. It allows developers to freestyle with a website and not program them to think in a certain way. Similarly, it allows digital marketing agencies or individual marketers to freestyle with their SEO strategy by making significant customizations.
Let’s look at a few SEO considerations that we must factor in when dealing with Craft CMS – calling out to all the newbie Digital marketers – here is your holy grail!
1) Metadata and SEO-Friendly Markup
As a part of content planning, Metadata and markup text includes meta-title, meta description, title tags, alt-tags, and basically everything that tell the crawler what is what!
Craft CMS allows you to play with the code, remove them if you find it useless. It is contrary to various other CMS, especially WordPress, that only lets you manipulate codes.
So, when you have the chance to change the way your website flow, jump at the chance because crawlers enjoy something different.
Now, coming back to Metadata; so, Metadata is content that you write mainly for the crawlers and not the users. Such data lets them identify the location of the webpage and index it accordingly.
Similarly, markups like title tags, alt-tag, and others are also for the crawlers and the users. As content writers, the first thing we’re taught is to structure the content so that it is easy for the users to browse without straining, and Markups facilitate that.
Here are a few must-follow rules when working with these elements;
- For Title Tag;
- Try to include your primary keyword.
- Limit it between 60-70 characters.
- Be as crisp as possible.
- For Heading Tag;
- Ensure that you follow the hierarchy (Title Tag > H1 > H2 > H3…).
- Ignoring the channel might throw the crawlers off-course and result in a lower ranking.
- Here, include your other keywords (can consider long-tailed as well)
- Be consistent
- Alt Tags
- Ideally, Alt tags are texts given to images solely for the ease of the search engine crawlers.
- Craft CMS makes it easy for you by adding the title properties automatically.
These little things make a huge difference in your ranking!
2) The Right SEO Plugin
For the longest time, SEOmatic has been the first choice for many developers. But currently, Sprout SEO is also rising in power to complete with SEOmatic.
While both these plugins offer similar features, SEOmatic covers a wide SEO task area, and Sprout SEO specializes in Metadata. Our vote would go to SEOmatic for its precision and wide coverage area.
SEOmatic looks at SEO from a human perspective and includes social media cards to create a wholesome impact on your content strategy to pitch that SEO score.
While Sprout SEO comes in two price structures, Free and $99/year, SEOmatic only follows a single price structure of $99/year.
For SEOMatic;
For Sprout SEO;
3) XML sitemaps, internal linking, and minifying files
If you’ve read until here, you already know that Craft CMS is pretty generous with SEO. And your next step might just be to hire a Craft CMS developer or a digital marketing agency if your website is up-and-running.
But if you aren’t there yet, this will surely be the tipping point.
With the help of a plugin, Craft CMS automatically creates a sitemap for the crawlers. A sitemap acts as a direction map for the crawlers. It helps them navigate to different web pages quickly. And Craft’s automatic feature is definitely a boon!
Stemming from the sitemap comes the internal linking factor. Internal linking is usually a part of every content marketing strategy. So, when you create internal links, you’re only helping crawlers establish a hierarchy between your webpages, making it easy for them to index and rank you.
Finally, just like Craft, crawlers abhor massive files since it increases the loading time, and eventually, the website lags. Minimizing the size of your file helps you include light-weight data and keep the crawlers happy.
Wrapping Up
When you hire Craft CMS developers, apart from talking about development, you must factor in the SEO activity. Because there might be plugins to help you individually, Craft enjoys the human touch and steers clear from automation.
We have laid down three considerations that you must factor in before you talk to your developer or a digital marketing agency. Accepting these will help you look at SEO in a much more personal way than leaving it to the plugins to play their part.
You must remember, SEO involves a much more personal touch than any other activity. Giving it the time and consideration will only help your Craft website rank higher on the SERPs.