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!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Can access my site using www
Hello, when I try to access my website using www i would like it to redirect to non www but instead it shows a sal error message.
On-Page Optimization | | Voopoo2 -
Reducing number of site pages?
Hi, I am looking through my site structure and I have a lot of pages left over from the days of article keywords. Probably 7 or 8 years ago, someone sold my husband on article key word pages. I have slowly gotten rid of a lot of them as they have fallen out out of the ranks. I would like to get rid of the rest, probably 5 or 6 pages. Will it hurt my rankings to delete pages and redirect them? My customers really like the simplicity of our site and I want to keep it that way, plus clean up flags that Moz is telling me is a problem. I think its easier to keep less pages top notch than have to worry with a lot of them. Especially since my customers aren't viewing them. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | CalicoKitty20000 -
On Site Question: Duplicate H2...
Hi All A few on-site audit tools pull information on duplicate H2 tags on pages. This implies it's a bad thing and should be fixed - is that the case? On one of my sites the tag-line is in H2 in the header, so appears on every page... Just wondering if this is something worth fixing. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | GTAMP0 -
SEO audit on a beta site
HI there, Is there much point conducting an SEO site audit on a site that has not yet launched and is protected behind a login? Presumably none of the usual SEO tools (Moz, Screaming Frog etc) can crawl this site becuase it is all locked behind a login. Would it be better to launch it and then do a site audit? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | CosiCrawley0 -
Harms of hidden categories on SEO
On our website we have some invisible/hidden categories on our site. Can anyone advise whether these are harmful in terms of SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Less Tags better for SEO?
I am currently reviewing my strategy when it comes to categories and tags on my site. Having been no-indexed for some time, and having many tags with just one entry I am thinking that this is not optimal for SEO purposes. This is what I am planning: Categories - Change these to Index, but only after adding a hundred words or so by way of introduction (see this example - https://www.besthostnews.com/news/hosting/a-small-orange-news/). With the categories I am thinking of highlighting key articles as well to improve link juice distribution to older articles that are important. Tags - About half my tags have only 1 entry, with a few more just having 2 entries. I am thinking of deleting all tags with just one entry, and trying to merge those with just two or 3 entries where it makes sense to do so. I will keep these as no-index, but I think this will mean more optimal distribution of link juice within the site. I would appreciate your thoughts \ suggestions on the best practices here.
On-Page Optimization | | TheWebMastercom0 -
Using Escaped Fragments with SEO
Our e-commerce platform is in the process of changing to what we call app based stores (essentially running in a browser as single page web-app) With these new stores they are being built in HTML 5 and using escaped fragments.
On-Page Optimization | | marketing_zoovy.com
Currently merchants are usually running 2 stores until we launch to app site at 100%. My questions are really concerning the app stores which right now show on a subdomain but will essentially take over the primary domain. Here is an example:
app.tikimater.com and app.sportsworld.com Since I am not a developer, I'm really having a hard time understanding the escaped fragments. I'm using this but https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started I'm not sure what my actual urls should look like and what the canonical should be set to. Right now they have been removed but previously they had http:app.tikimaster.com#!v=1 Also, and how I should be setting up my meta information for Google so 1) pages are indexed timely 2) pages are indexed with the correct information. I am still setting the meta titles and descriptions but in some instances Google uses other info. With the new platform we are moving away from on page content (written paragraphs) but category pages would have related products embedded. Should I still be pushing to have some type of intro text, since it would solely be for SEO and not the shoppers experience. All product pages have content (product description etc) Thank you for any advice0 -
What is the most SEO friendly Shopping Cart?
What is the most SEO friendly shopping cart? I have been using zen-cart for 6 years. Seems Google doesn't like it as much as other carts. I started a new site about 6 months ago using Magento. When I build links to this site the terms move. The terms are very similar. So I would imagine the competition is the same. I am curious if anybody has tried with different carts and found anyone to be better than the others. Also the new site has about one tenth the amount of products but has a lot more pages indexed.
On-Page Optimization | | kicksetc0