Cascade Server CMS Helps Customers Improve Their Search Engine Ranking

These days, search engine optimization (SEO) feels like a moving target, making it ever more difficult for businesses to get their name out there and place high among the search engine listings for their main keywords. Back in the olden days, as recently as five years ago, it was easy enough to just outsource your SEO to a specialty agency who would optimize your pages, stuff your keywords, maybe do some shady black hat tricks, and make sure all your metadata boxes were checked. It really was as simple as that. Throw some AdWords money in for good measure, and voila! Ample web traffic was yours!

But as all good things must do, those days have come to an end. It’s just not that simple anymore. In the modern days of Panda and Penguin, of content is king, of repurposing and reuse, you have to be a content machine in order to compete with all the other websites out there fighting for the top unpaid search placements. The truth is, content freshness is one of the biggest factors in your search engine ranking. Not just fresh content, but lots of it!

Sure, the old stuff still matters–keeping your metadata descriptions under a certain length, strategically using the keywords that you want to rank for, and creating traffic via referral links from other sites–but even those things have changed some in the last five years. For example, referral links need to come from reputable sources, or they can actually be worse for your site than no referral links at all. And using keywords is a must, but you can be penalized for over-using them.

So how do you balance the new requirements with the traditional best practices? Well, it starts by having the right tools. The creators of Cascade Server CMS have made it a top priority to provide the best available tools to their clients for driving traffic to their business websites. After all, isn’t the purpose of a CMS to help you create the best website you can? And if you’re spending money on a website and a CMS, shouldn’t you find the best product that will give you a solid return on your investment?

Cascade Server provides a unique set of tools to help you improve your business’ SEO. For example, Cascade Server offers content freshness reporting to help you keep all pages and content up to date. The freshness factor is not exclusively about putting out new pages consistently but also about adding new content to existing pages. The more recently a page has been significantly modified, the fresher it is considered to searched engines, and therefore, the more likely it is to be served up as a top search result.

Cascade Server allows you to see how fresh your pages are based on the a specific time frame since they were last modified (30 days, 60 days, 90 days, etc.) as well as to view pages that have “review dates” set that are upcoming or overdue. This way, you can always make sure you are updating pages as soon as they need to be updated based on time-sensitive content, and you can make sure all the pages on your site are refreshed regularly to please the search engines.

The Cascade Server Content Freshness Report shows you what portion of your site is out of date and also allows you to drill down to see stale pages, set new review dates, notify users that their pages are stale, or make updates directly.

Planning new content is essential to maintain freshness on your site, drive new traffic, generate new leads and subscribers, and be a thought leader in your industry. With the Editorial Calendar that comes standard with Cascade Server, you can plan blog posts and other content pieces, assign them to users, schedule them on your calendar, and even see how past pieces are performing.

With the Editorial Calendar that comes standard with Cascade Server, you can plan blog posts and other content pieces, assign them to users, schedule them on your calendar, and even see how past pieces are performing. Regularly scheduling new content to be published can significantly improve your search ranking.

In addition to this data, Cascade Server also provides a Google Analytics connector, which allows you to bring additional traffic data right into the CMS. All of your content contributors and editors may not have access to your business’ Google Analytics account, but by bringing this data into the CMS, they can see directly how their content is driving traffic for the entire site.

By allowing content authors to see web traffic analytics right inside the CMS, you can empower them to create better content and hold them accountable for their work.

In addition to content freshness and analytics, it is important to remember the basics. That’s why Cascade Server provides SEO Scoring for every page on your site. While meeting these basic requirements may not give you much of a boost in rankings, not meeting them could result in SEO penalties that you will definitely want to avoid.

SEO Scoring in Cascade Server provides a way to ensure that you’re meeting the minimum basic requirements for search engine optimization. There’s a lot more to SEO than this checklist, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Just because search engine optimization has gotten harder, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Want to learn more about how Cascade Server can help with your SEO? We’d love to speak to you. Just fill out the form below, and we’ll be in touch within one business day to discuss your needs.

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