Vivant Media

Adding metatags from within a CMS does not unleash Armageddon on your site, period.

This has been a friendly reminder and Public Service Announcement.

No, I’m not talking about search engine rankings going bad. I’m talking about SEO techniques making website functionality break.

If you take a plain-vanilla website that’s been built with only HTML and images, that’s an easy site to optimize for SEs. However, throw in things like dynamic pages, URL rewrites, redirects, and so on and it gets harder and harder to optimize your pages for the stupid search engines.

While I totally support most of the SEO methods, such as using meta tags wisely, using the alt tag, increased use of heading tags, and etc… I don’t agree with radically changing the website’s underlying framework for the sake of SEO. A line must be drawn somewhere.

Sure, if you went balls-to-the-wall on SEO, your pages would soar in search rankings. Tons of people would flock to your website. You might get rich off the advertising revenue. But what good is all of that… if the techniques cause your site to be modified to the point where it’s running poorly?

Some thoughts on this would be appreciated!