What good is the ability to manage content on your website, if that controls limits your search engine optimization success? Not much.

Denver based SEO firm seOverflow recently posted their presentation slides on 7 Characteristics of an SEO Friendly CMS and I’ve embedded it below.

Lets look at each of the 7 SEO items and how they factor into our CMS, the Site Management Console.

1. Customizable title & meta tags – YES
Each page in the SMC has a “properties” option to edit your meta title tag, meta keywords and meta description.

2. Custom, keyword rich, SEO friendly URLs – YES
Each page gives you the ability to create it’s file path.
Example:  http://www.concretetreatmentsinc.com/concrete-services

3. Only one URL exists for each page – YES
The CMS will only let you have one unique file and URL structure.  No dynamic URLS, no canonical issues.

4. 301 Redirect Functionality – YES
Our CMS allows for 301 redirects and other redirects as needed.

5. Ability to add ALT tag to images – YES
In both our general content editor and custom templates, we allow for the ALT attribute for images.

6. Ability to create HTML & XML sitemaps – YES
Our CMS auto-generates  the HTML sitemap upon a full release and while we set-up XML sitemaps for our clients, they have access in our file manager to change this at anytime.

7. Ability to create keyword rich internal links – YES
Absolutely. From our initial design concepts, we are looking to help clients leverage internal linking and the CMS allows for multiple ways to easily control your links and their anchor text.

So overall, I think we get an A+ on this simple SEO checklist for our content management system. We offer these SEO benefits above and also have some more enhanced SEO features for larger sites or e-commerce websites.

With the vast array of functionality our CMS offers, you can see why businesses are often blown away by our web platform. Reliable, stable, flexible, scalable, easy to use and yes … very SEO friendly.

Not every project for Five involves creating a new web design.  Sometimes a company will come to us satisfied with their design, but in need of better technology to run it.  We can convert an existing website to our content management system (CMS) and improve numerous areas.

Streeter Companies, a Maple Grove, MN Commercial Property firm came to us with this situation.  They were satisfied with their current web design, but wanted to be able to change web content themselves, get more traffic from Google and offer more features on the site for users.

The Website CMS Conversion Provided:

• Control – Streeter can now add new pages to their website, new property listings, change or add photos and more. Our SMC tool gives them complete control of their website.
• Features – Streeter’s former website only allowed them to display a PDF and a few details on each property for lease. We upgraded each listing to display photos in a slideshow, interactive Google maps of the location, overview text of the property, auto PDF flyer creation, contact forms and social sharing features.
• Search Engine Friendly – The move to our CMS upgraded the Streeter website to keyword URLs, HTML & XML sitemaps, semantic content structure and internal linking.  These SEO enhancements are the start to their website earning better trust and rankings from the search engines.

So if your web design is acceptable and you need a better web platform for control and to build upon, give us a shout about converting to our CMS.

Five Technology is excited to announce the launch of TheHuntingAuthority.com web project.  This hunting community website combined a great web design interface with a ton of features.

Bringing Social Interaction To The Duck Blind
The guys behind The Hunting Authority came to us with the goal of being the best website an avid hunter and outdoors person could find.  Great design, great content, great features and most of all, a voice for the hunter.

We jumped at the challenge to build user profiles so that visitors to the site could create their own profile and interact with each other.

Here are some of the social features we built into the website:

• Account creation with screen name
• Ability to add/edit a bio
• Ability to designate hunting interests, areas and the ability to search other members with similar interests
• Status area to announce what you’re up to
• Bulletin board to leave comments on other members profiles
• Photo gallery to add your own hunting photos
• Ability to embed YouTube or other 3rd party video players
• Ability to write your own blog articles and comment/respond
• Ability to rate and review guides, outfitters and gear
• Ability to show your favorite web links

We packed a ton of great interaction and community tools into the initial launch of the website and already have more features slated as the website takes off.  We built out all of these features on our content management platform.

Hunting Blog
The site features a hunting blog that already is packed with great hunting info, wild game recipes, dog training tips and more.

Setting up a custom blog design isn’t a big deal for us, but the fact we integrated the profile account creation and log-in with the blog was pretty great.  This made the user profile creation just a single log-in for the site and simplified their ability to comment on blog articles.  It’s nice to have your CMS and WordPress play together so nicely, for everyone’s benefits.

Guides & Gear: Give Your Review
Once registered, the website users have the ability to add, rate and review outfitters, hunting guides and the hunting gear they use to hunt with. Users can search for hunting guides and outfitters by searching states or Canadian provinces and then view detailed information.

Working Footer
Lately we have voiced our thoughts on website footers being important.  On this website we put both first, second and even some deeper levels of links and pages into the footer.  You’ll see more of this as we feel its a great usability feature.

Success In The Crosshairs
As you can see, this web design project was no small creation.  The website has many more features than what we touched on here.  If you are a hunter, we encourage you to check out TheHuntingAuthority.com and create a profile. We enjoyed the challenge of the project and look forward to continuing to build out more great features.

We can vouch that these guys are dedicated to having the best hunting website on the Interweb.  Great content, great features and giving those with the passion and knowledge a voice; that’s what The Hunting Authority is about.

Let’s face it, you don’t dare build a website for your business without a content management system at the core of it these days. With many choices out there, what flavor is right for you to manage your website?

We obviously like the features and benefits of our CMS, the Site Management Console, so we thought we’d give you 5 good reasons to work with our web platform.

ONE: User Friendly Interface - The SMC interface was designed for the business owner to update website content, not the IT staff (like other CMS solutions). It’s very easy and intuitive to manage content and website features.

TWO: Scalable – Watch your website grow from 30 pages to 3,000 as your content and feature requirements increase. Road blocks for future business processes do not exist, as the SMC is fully customizable to integrate and evolve with your needs.

THREE: Software as a Service (SAAS) – The SMC software and hosting infrastructure are maintained and supported fully by our staff. No requirements to staff a technical crew who’s responsibility is to ensure your website is up and running 99.99% of the time, we cover that.

FOUR: SEO Friendly – Features built into the SMC will not guarantee you will be on the first page of Google for a competitive keyword, but it will ensure the basic SEO standards are easily implemented on your site. With properly designed layouts, the SEO basics such as Title Tags, Page Names, SEO URLs, Site Maps, Alt Tags, H Tags, etc. will all be taken care of when you add content.

FIVE: A Proven Platform – The SMC has been managing websites for over 10 years. The attrition rate on the SMC is amazing. The SMC is loved!

So there you have just 5 reasons of the hundreds we could list off (including fresh bacon, just ask). If you are having a tough time picking the right CMS for you, give us a shout and we can throw a great content management solution your way.

This past month we had the opportunity to complete a website redesign for the Buffalo, MN Chamber of Commerce. It’s a project I enjoyed for the fact I grew up in Buffalo, moved back 4 years ago and have worked with them on and off for the past 6 years.  The Chamber has been on our content management tool, the SMC, for over 5 years but the site’s design was about 7 years old and in need of a serious redesign.

Web Redesign Needs
Visually we wanted the site to feel more vibrant and alive with ample places for photos.  Buffalo is positioned between two beautiful lakes with the downtown right next to Buffalo Lake, so the ability to show off the setting was a must.

We have also built in photo galleries that the chamber will be adding to in the future allowing them to better recap community and chamber events.

Usability wise, we aimed to improve the navigation a bit and utilized drop down navigation for their future expansion and content additions.

Share The News With WordPress & RSS
The website is most frequently updated with news items and upcoming area events on the home page.  We integrated WordPress into the site so that the news updates would be archived and extremely SEO friendly.  In the near future we will be adding RSS and email subscription abilities for site users to be notified as news hist the website.

+ Check out the new Buffalo Chamber website and let us know what you think of it!