How to Choose an SEO Friendly CMS

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.

About the Author

Ann Liu is a certified professional Internet marketer, passionate blogger, author, infopreneur, web and social marketing consultant. Signup for her newsletter or RSS feed to receive her latest news, tips and articles at http://MarketingbyAnn.net. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook too.

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