Search engine optimization is frustrating, time consuming, expensive and, unfortunately, necessary for any organization conducting business on the internet… that is to say, all businesses.

It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the constant changes to the search algorithms at each of the major search engines, and if you missed the change where something that was perfectly acceptable two weeks ago is suddenly frowned up, you can face penalties from the search engine provider, making it even harder for customers to find you. Most businesses don’t have the time or resources to devote to managing their SEO on a daily basis, let alone to develop the optimized content necessary to improve relevancy scores.

For many businesses, all of this adds up to choosing the lesser evil between paying an expensive SEO provider to manage their search engine optimization for them or letting SEO fall to the wayside and risking getting lost somewhere down below the third page. Of course, even if you do pay for a SEO service, there is still no guarantee of a strong SERP ranking, or even that a strong ranking will result in increased web traffic and sales.

One area where developers are really taking notice is Scrivito’s out-of-the-box tools for SEO. Scrivito enables businesses to improve their website optimization right from the very beginning, with no plug-ins needed. And it empowers editors to manage their optimization themselves, making SEO agencies unnecessary for daily operations.

For Ruby shops, this means designing websites that are more prepared and better equipped to score higher in Google’s search algorithm. Your clients won’t need to blow their budgets or stretch out their timelines hiring a SEO expert to review the site you just built for search engine optimization best practices. The best practices are built into Scrivito from the start.

Right out of the box, Scrivito can improve your optimization by simply making your site look more professional and more relevant to Google and the other search engines. And the first step is ensuring that your site has clean code. The code from most content management systems is all too often a mess, and bloated code makes finding and correcting errors almost impossible. Scrivito generates clean, efficient code with zero HTML or CSS errors.

Speed kills. Or, at least, lack of speed does. The search engines rank sites based on user experience, and some of the largest factors in user experience are page load times, content load times, and crash frequency. A content delivery network, or CDN, decentralizes a site’s content across multiple edge locations worldwide. This speeds up access times by reducing the number of hops between a user and the server they are accessing your content from, and makes your site less prone to crashing by reducing the number of content requests coming into any one server. Most CMS don’t provide out-of-the-box CDN support. Scrivito does.

As almost everyone with a website is aware, Google recently changed their mobile search algorithm (again) to prioritize mobile-friendly sites for searches conducted on mobile devices. If you’re site isn’t mobile friendly, you aren’t showing up in the search results. With mobile users surpassing desktop users, mobile optimization is critical. Scrivito makes it simple to develop adaptive and responsive website designs that are seen by the search engines as being more relevant to mobile users, and therefore will rank higher in the search results. Scrivito even provides automatic handling of content assets (e.g. resizing of images) based on a user’s device type.

In order to effectively test and evaluate the site you build, Scrivito also provides seamless integration for webmaster tools such as Google Analytics, and has a built-in keyword checker that measures both density and frequency.

When you are ready to give your SEO service the boot and take on even advanced optimization strategies in-house, Scrivito has your back.

Link quality can have a dramatic effect on your search rankings. Scrivito’s advanced SEO features will help you improve your link quality by integrating automatic handling and recognition of links. A unique ID is appended to the URL destinations of all links, ensuring a stable link structure and eliminating the risk of broken links. If you ever restructure your site structure, your link destinations will still be valid. URLs can also be configured to include a freely defined “slug,” increasing the relevancy of individual pages and boosting the overall search ranking of the site.

Scrivito is a widget-based CMS, eschewing rigid templates for a more customizable and dynamic user experience. This extends to search engine optimization through the support of semantic tags like rich snippets. Key information on blog posts, locations, events, media assets and even product information can be entered into a simple widget to be displayed in search results. By placing this information on the search results page, your clients will gain a one-up on competitors who need customers to visit their actual website to find out where they are located, their hours of operations, or the price of their products. Customers searching a topic will see your client’s info before they ever decide which website to click on.

If your business is global, Scrivito supports localization and multi-site management, ensuring that changes made to the site are applied across all versions, while still adhering to local requirements and maintaining nuances from site to site.

Scrivito can help the editors of your website navigate all the frustrations of search engine optimization, easily, securely, and without the added expense of a SEO consultant or service.