Jahia EE v.6.1: Enhanced Communication and SEO

Jahia, is the innovative company behind the premier web content integration software, which leverages “state of the art open source frameworks and libraries…for a complete solution for developing, integrating, delivering, and managing content across Intranets, Extranets, and Internet.”   On April 14, 2010, they released Jahia EE v.6.1, which will, they say, “enhance” communication with web users.  What do changes in Jahia have in store for search engine optimization? 

Key areas that Jahia addresses are search engine results, search engine optimization, and improvements in social media modules.  In terms of SEO, the updated version incorporates “SEO best practices,” including a new vanity URL feature, which allows users to add any number of URL aliases to a given page to increase traffic and support marketing efforts.  Websites can be penalized by search engines for maintaining obsolete URLs, and broken links also irritate consumers.  To prevent this, Jahia keeps all internal and external lines current and operational.  

In addition, Jahia EE v.6.1 will offer: 

• Search spelling suggestions for better results.
• Improved blog template as a standalone site or plug-in to include user-generated comments, ratings, tags, and built-in search.
• Newsletter function to customize communication with their consumers and/or communities.
• Improved search speed and more finely tuned results.
• Search within documents, including Office and PDF files.
• Semantic search. 

A word about semantic search: this is a new open source semantic search product from Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS), which is an ongoing project. Jahia users can access semantically driven tag clouds, faceted search, and taxonomy (or classification) driven navigation.  The goal is to more effectively filter content and produce relevant results. 

According to CMS Wire, “The sum of those small but significant improvements should boost results speed by reducing wasted search time, and accuracy to improve the user experience and provide better results.”