Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
HTML Site SEO (NO CMS)
-
I have got a client site, which is dated (2007) and has not been shifted to any recognised CMS yet. It is HTML based. Is it possible to SEO on such a site? Is it even worth it?
If it is possible to do SEO on this, any suggestions will be highly appreciated.
Thank you.
-
Thank you for all the wonderful responses. It was really helpful. I have been in touch with my client and we are moving the site to WP shortly.
-
You can certainly SEO a website that doesn't use a CMS.
The important question is, given the nature of the site, the budget and goals of the client, and the resources you have to work with, is a hard coded HTML website the most practical solution?
Content management systems like WordPress, Drual, and HubSpot exist to make it easy to build and manage a website. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of individuals and businesses who need a website do not have extensive technical resources to be able to create and maintain a complex, highly-customized website.
I'd be willing to bet that your client fits this bill, which means you can probably help stretch their marketing budget further by using a CMS to make your job easier.
-
Absolutely!!!!!
If you think about it logically, what does a CMS do. It uses templates and stores content which is then output to the page - this webpage is HTML and is the basis of pretty much all webpages. Just because a site is HARD coded in HTML without the use of a CMS that compiles it for you does not mean it cannot be optimised.
If you ever look into the source code of a page output via CMS to the browser, you can see all the components usually utilised to give your a strong well optimised site, however if HARD coded you can probably go even further depending on your skillset to provide even more optimisation on a more bespoke level.
Don;t delay get stuck in
-
Congratulations! You get the chance to do a good optimization both SEO and WPO.
The only problem with static pages is to go hand can be costly if there is much volume of content, in which case you can go about doing search and replace, or make a calendar of changes to be improving slowly website.
-
Hi ArthurRadtke,
In theory, a well-coded and optimized HTML site will perform as well as pages from a well-designed CMS site in organic search rankings.
Some of the most important HTML elements to achieve SEO success.
HTML title tag: They have always been and remain the most important HTML signal that search engines use to understand what a page is about. Bad titles on your pages are like having bad book titles.
Meta Description tag: If the HTML title is the equivalent to a book title, the meta description is like the blurb on the back describing the book.
Header tags: Header tags are a formal way to identify key sections of a web page.
Structured Data: The result of structured data often translates into what is called a ‘rich snippet‘
Hope it helps you.
-
Sometimes plain HTML based website are easier to optimize. Make sure you add the necessary meta tags, google analytics, headings, etc. you could manually create friendly urls with htaccess! also manually create a robots.txt file and even an xml sitemap which you should find many online portals that could create one for you. Because you will be working on just the code, don't forget to check if there is any broken links!
yes you can still work just fine the html websites!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Do SSL Certificates Affect On SEO?
Does really a SSL certificate affect on SEO? How? Why? According to my hosting provider (ganje.host), "https" improves SEO! As I know, It decreases speed. So how does it improve SEO when my speed is slower than before?
On-Page Optimization | | MirzaeeMustafa0 -
Tags - Good or bad for SEO
We are getting Moz errors for duplicate content because tag pages share the same blog posts. Is there any way to fix this? Are these errors bad for SEO, or can I simply disregard these and ignore them? We are also getting Moz errors for missing descriptions on tag pages. I am unsure how to fix these errors, as we do not actually have pages for these on our WordPress site where we are able to put in a description. I have heard that having tags can be good for SEO? (We don't mind having several links that show up when searching for us on google...) As far as the SEO goes, I am not sure what to do. Does anyone know the best strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | Christinaa0 -
Is Wix still terrible for SEO?
In Australia, I hear it over and over again that Wix is literally the worst site builder you can use due to it's poor site build for SEO. Has anyone here got some tangible reasons for why this is? As I am constantly getting asked this by clients who are using Wix and want me to help with their SEO.
On-Page Optimization | | UndergrndMarketing0 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
Do Parent Categories Hurt SEO?
I have parent categories and subcategories. Will it be harder for the subcategories to rank well because they have a parent category? The URL is longer, for one. I am just wondering if I should not have parent categories. I have one category page doing really well and I am trying to boost the others (most of which are subcategories) and this is a concern for me. Thanks! Edit: I also have a category that has 2 parent categories. I want it automatically in those 2 categories and one of its own. By itself it is very important keyword. Is this ok or should I have it be a parent category?
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
Is content aggregation good SEO?
I didn't see this topic specifically addressed here: what's the current thinking on using content aggregation for SEO purposes? I'll use flavors.me as an example. Flavors.me lets you set up a domain that pulls in content from a variety of services (Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, RSS, etc.). There's also a limited ability to publish unique content as well. So let's say that we've got MyDomain.com set up, and most of the content is being drawn in from other services. So there's blog posts from WordPress.com, videos from YouTube, a photo gallery from Flickr, etc. How would Google look at this scenario? Is MyDomain.com simply scraped content from the other (more authoritative) sources? Is the aggregated content perceived to "belong" to MyDomain.com or not? And most importantly, if you're aggregating a lot of content related to Topic X, will this content aggregation help MyDomain.com rank for Topic X? Looking forward to the community's thoughts. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | GOODSIR0 -
SEO for Japan
Google and Yahoo are the two major search engines in Japan. You can search using Western characters, and you often see English language results with Japanese (Chinese) characters next to them. As I don't speak Japanese, how do I approach SEO for my Japanese-language site? would appreciate any experiences and educational sources on the topic.
On-Page Optimization | | KnutDSvendsen0 -
German SEO
Just a quickie, Does anybody know of any strong German SEO agencies? Many Thanks Sean
On-Page Optimization | | Yozzer0
