Quickly and easily create and deploy content is the nature ability with content management systems (CMS). Thus, there’s no doubt that CMS are a quick, powerful, and affordable way to get on to the web in an advanced way nowadays.
By definition, a CMS is a publishing tool; it allows you to update your website contents easily and smartly. So if you are a non technical guy knowing not much about the html or about web designing, using CMS will allow you to update your website contents without much of a hassle.
According to Wikipedia,
A Content Management System (CMS) is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. The procedures are designed to:
• Allow for a large number of people to contribute to and share stored data
• Control access to data, based on user roles. User roles define what information each user can view or edit
• Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
• Reduce repetitive duplicate input
• Improve the ease of report writing
• Improve communication between users
Basically, a CMS is a software/system that manages the content of your website, which is relatively simple to use. However, they do not come without their challenges, particularly in terms of how well they can be tuned for search engine optimization.
In case if you don’t know or not sure whether you need a CMS for your website or not, below this diagram from search engine optimization community can help you. If you are looking for the info that cover specific CMS platforms to help you manage the task, there’s some great web resources already out there, such as Open Source CMS and CMS Matrix.
To have a search engine friendly CMS for your website, to help you have a good start when evaluating a platform yourself or developing a list of questions to ask a potential web designer or CMS vendor, according to Ozone, below this checklist should help.
Checklist: What to Look For in a Search Engine Friendly CMS
• Size of the supporting community. A massive user base and developer base usually means that you’ll be able to find the components and resources you need to SEO your CMS quickly and affordably.
• Support for customization of Title tags, Meta tags, image Alt tags, and link rel=canonical tags on a per-page (or per-image) basis.
• Control of Meta Robots tag on a per-page basis.
• Support for static, customizable URLs (sometimes called permalinks).
• Automatic link management. Moving a page to a new location shouldn’t require a manual site-wide update of links pointing to that page.
• Automatic updating of a sitemap.xml file when site content is added or changed.
• Support for a custom 404 (page-not-found) page.
• Availability of search engine friendly design themes and/or support for tweaking a theme to make it more optimized for search engines.
• Ability to customize the link anchor text in content embedded links that point to other pages internal and external to your site.
• Flexibility to add custom attributes to the HTML tags that define the structure of the page. This is particularly useful for adding the rel=nofollow attribute to internal or external links as required.
• Support for web 2.0 and community oriented features such as blogs, forums, and social tagging and bookmarking.
• Support for custom URL redirection (typically using a 301 redirect). Sometimes this can be accomplished by using mod_rewrite and editing the .htaccess file, but that can get complicated. Some CMS platforms provide a much easier and elegant way to manage redirections directly through the administrative user interface.
In regarding to content management systems that have a reputation for being particularly well suited for search engines in the search engine optimization community, here are some of CMSs for you to choose, some of them work reasonably well straight out of the box but most of them will need to be customized to truly embrace SEO best practices.
• Joomla
• WordPress (Traditionally a blogging tool, but makes for a nice lightweight CMS)
• MODx
• Drupal
• Expression Engine
• DotNetNuke
For the WordPress and Joomla, both can handle fairly large sites and allow for code/content optimizations, several plugins for both systems will help with sitemap submissions, meta tag optimizations, video, social, page rank sculpting, etc. And both are heavily supported by developers.
If SEO is your priority and blog is your core component focus, then WordPress with the $59.95 StudioPress theme, if you need more capabilities then Drupal and Joomla in that order.
Finally, remember that choosing a CMS is not all about SEO. There are many other factors need to bear in mind as well, which including the cost, support, usability, aesthetics, syndication tools, and its performance. Ultimately, your goal is to strike a healthy balance between your organization’s requirements, your audience’s requirements, and the search engine’s requirements.
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