Movable Type & SEO ?

Hi all DP members and lurkers,

Since many people here seem to be into blogging, I feel that DP is the right forum to ask this:
I'm about to setup Movable Type and have 2 questions about its SE-friendliness... namely:

1. Is it possible to make "one post per page" archives? if so, will these pages be named according to the post title or have just a number/date assigned to them? I'm aiming for post-title-goes-here.html of course... any way to accomplish this?

2. If I use several types of archives at the same time, eg. monthly and by category, will Movable Type make ONE solid page per post and link to it from both archives or will there be 2 sites with the same content (one for each type of archive)?

 

I don't know specifics, but I've heard Movable Type isn't very good for SEO.
Although i could be wrong.

We recently got a customer that came to us with MT (movabletype) as their back end, and they run a store selling clothes. We found that there was zero SEO thought when it was setup and developed. I believe they wanted to be able to post news like a blog and still sell their small-ish stock of items.

My wife looked into the mods you can get for MT and she didn't like what she saw and suggested we set them up with OSCommerce. My wife has found good SEO type mods for OSCommerce and they seem to work well, with tweaking.

So although I don't know the answers to your specific questions I do know we steered clear of MT because of it's simple limitations. I believe some were that you couldn't edit your Title for each page, or all meta tags were the same on every page, etc.

If you'd like I can find out the specifics later on tonight, but I'd make sure to do research into these simple things before going to MT.

At the same time I've always had the impression that MT was waaay more modifiable than Blogger since it's all on your server, but after just recently learning about the small limitations in MT we decided it wasn't best for optimum SEO.

Again I could be wrong on all of this.
If I am please let me know as I'd like to know more about MT's SEO capabilities.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience with the script!

Personally, I am still in research... I especially want to be able to generate URLs with the title in it!!

I feel that MT is a very powerful solution which is highly customizable. I don't worry about its features at all since I am sure that it will do the job just fine - I just worry a bit about some little SEO details, the biggest being the filename issue of course.
I did not find any mods that would do the job.

It'd be great if you could find out the exact limitations you experienced with Movable Type and shoot me a few lines here.

 

I'll see what specifics my wife found out and relay it back to this thread.

I still think MT is a good option for a blog, and it seems like it can do whatever you want, but with our situation we fond some snags.

I'll let you know.

 

mxlabs,
I really wouldn't worry about the file name issue.
Sure it helps, but it's not that major.

Personally, I would go for WordPress.

I'm going to be moving my blog over to it pretty soon.
It is so verstile, that you can pretty much bend it to whatever you want it to do for you.

MT as far as I know is pretty good (Yahoo use it for their blog)...

SGH, the tites on the yahoo blog look pretty good to me, although admitidly there are no keywords or descriptions on the pages.

Anyway - Wordpress... really good looking bit of kit

 

Hello,
IMO, Movable Type is very good for SEO. MT creates nice static pages. You can specify the title and keywords for the post. In addition, using some tags in the tepmlates and some of the fields, you can control almost every aspect of your SEO work - title, keywords, desctiption, H1, H2, etc.

Also, you can namipulate the naming scheme of the generated HTML files using the same tags which are used to customize the templates.

 

I agree with Julian - MT is excellent for MT. You can make your archives dependent upon your posts title and can archive in the way in which you mention.

Another option that you might want to consider is Word Press which I am actually swapping my blogs over to - it is just as SEO friendly but has some excellent features and is a lot easier and less time consuming to use than MT. Both will do what you ask about above.