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
-
Are Wildcard Subdomain Hurting my SEO?
I have some sites with a lot of categories (category, sub-category, sub-subcategory) and locations (country, state/territory, city). To avoid listing pages really deep in my hierarchy I used wildcard subdomains for the locations, but lately I have been told that might be hurting my overall SEO efforts. I have a lot of URLs like https://city-state-country.example.com on one side of the domain and example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory on the other. In the middle you see stuff like city-state-country.example.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. Would I be better off moving the locations to the right side of the domain name? Then you might find stuff like example.com/country/state/city/category/subcategory/subsubcategory and everything in between. I think I could do the new rewrite rules fairly easily since every country slug is just two characters long.
On-Page Optimization | | PostAlmostAnything0 -
Best site Template, Structure, etc. for SEO
If I were to spin up a new site what do people recommend as the best template, services, etc. Do you have an example of the perfect structure, I want to point my team to an example page and say - This is perfect, do this but for our product (structure, content amount, etc) Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | Jamesmcd030 -
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 -
Phone number for SEO
We have had an interesting question from a client. They have asked if removing their phone number from their website would have an affect on their rankings. Our immediate answer was 'No' but it may affect the Brand, Usability and Customer experience by restricting the methods of contact. This then made us think that perhaps then it could have an effect in the long term. This situation is also complicated by the fact that they do not have a Google Local Plus account for operational, sensitivity reasons (they don't want to openly publicise their address) We believe that there shouldn't be any negative affect but thought we would open a discussion. Thanks in advance for any comments/ideas.
On-Page Optimization | | vital_hike0 -
Does Bolding Text Have Any Impact on SEO?
Someone told me it does but I thought that was old school way of thinking. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | tryfantasy1 -
Best SEO Extension/Plugin for NOPCommerce Site?
Hi I am working for a client who is using NOPCommerce. It doesn't look like they have a SEO Plugin in - although you can add meta descriptions to Products - which works fine, the Product categories have SEO components too but do not seem to work and all 'other' content /CMS pages have no SEO components whatsoever. Does anyone know of a plugin which would resolve this? (PS never used NOPCommerce before!)
On-Page Optimization | | AllieMc0 -
Trying to SEO a site that used Header Tags for Design
I am trying to SEO a website that was built years ago and uses Header tags for design. The site must have 25 and tags used for design purpose. Is there any way to work around this problem? Perhaps a code that tells Google to ignore these as Headers? The web designers say that they are looking to fix the problem sometime this summer but you never know if that means it a month away or years away. I really want to help this website but I believe that the Header tags are one of the reasons that his site does not show in the top 100 rankings for any keywords. Any help would be great. www.wallybuysell.com Chris.K
On-Page Optimization | | CKerr0 -
How to use canonical with mobile site to main site
I am pretty sure that the mobile version of the main site needs to be the same canonical link from what I understand. I am trying to find good docuementation that supports this. Even better if its from Google or Matt Cutts. I have a main domain like http://www.mydomain.com the mobile version of this is http://www.mydomain.com/m/ Should my canonical be rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com"/> for both these pages?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0