Search Engine Friendly Content Management Systems
Posted: June 13th, 2008
Content management systems are a godsend for today’s busy webmasters. They turn the nightmare of developing a website from scratch into a more manageable one-person task, and allow webmasters to focus on what matters the most - content. The benefits continue to multiply as the web development endeavours become more ambitious and complicated, with the help of third-party plugins, modules, and apps.
Unfortunately, some content management systems are far from being search engine friendly, and are a source of headaches for many SEOs and webmasters who are mindful of SEO. Even the more popular CMS’s such as WordPress, PostNuke, and Joomla require some tinkering before they’re stamped with the search engine friendly seal of approval.
Dynamic Pages
Having dynamically created content and URLs isn’t as big of an issue as it once was, now that spiders are better abled to crawl dynamic URLs. If dynamic pages are a must, then try to keep navigational parameters to a minimum (a maximum of two if possible). For example, www.yourdomain.com/?categoryID=animals&pageID=cats.
It would still be best, however, to use static pages wherever possible alongside a canonical naming structure. For example, www.yourdomain.com/animals/cats.php.
Content Behind Forms
Although some spiders will crawl the elements and attributes of an HTML form to figure out what the form is about, they will not fill in any of the fields nor submit any information. This means that content stored in a database that expects retrieval from a form cannot be access by spiders, and consequently cannot be crawled or indexed either.
Cookies
Delicious? They sure are. In fact, some CMS’s require cookies before displaying content. This is a clear no-no for a search engine friendly content management system. Although your CMS may request to set a cookie, it should not require one. The same mantra applies for session IDs. Viewing content should not be subject to having a session ID in the URL string.
Word Press is still #1 with me, and way too many I know. It works well as a weblog, but can change into a full blown CMS by using static pages for the content. With widgets & plugins galore for WP, you can never go wrong.
And as for the “tinkering”??? There is little to none in SEO terms… WP has plugins that will take care of all your SEO needs fourfold. The only real tinkering is done in the installation of the widgets and plug-ins, and very little to no knowledge of PHP is required to perform such tasks.
When working with WP templates tho, you might need just a basic overview of the “loop”, where it is, what it does. But the majority of the time, all widget and plug-in creators will give step-by-step instructions on altering the code.
There are many great CMS scripts for sure. But WP carries a large market share both with their hosted blogs: WordPress.Com , as well as the standalone version that can be installed on your own domain.
WP forums are great, everyone is helpful, most questions can be answered in the forums, or the WB knowledge base.
Granted I am not an SEO expert, but I do know from years of WP use, that it has worked well for me, and many others.
C-Ya Movable Type… You never really had a chance at long term staying power.
No mention of Drupal? Out of the box Drupal is the best CMS I’ve seen so far. I have hardly needed to worry about that at all with any sites that I have done. Deserves at least a mention if Joomla is on there.
Cheers.
@Guy:
Thanks for the comment. WordPress definitely has a very large supporting community behind it, which helps in many ways such as search engine friendly plugins and themes. Hopefully this post will make people realize that the base WP CMS does need tinkering.
For some reason, permalinks are set to unfriendly by default and truly optimized titles are hard to specify without a plugin or two. And then there’s the issue of properly optimizing whichever theme you go with as well.
@Andrew:
Drupal! I’ve found it a bit more user-friendly than Joomla (or at least has a flatter learning curve). While I’m at it, shout outs to e107 and XOOPS too!
I think a lot of it has to do with the WP theme you pick to begin with, some are much easier to work with than others.
@Josh:
Agreed. I’ve come across some themes that aren’t even widget-ready, which in my opinion should be standard across all themes.
I had used Joomla at one of my site… I think it’s really easy to handle things, such as videos (seyret plugin is he best), forums, blogs, directories but apparently I’ve got problems over search engines. So I decided to delete at all after using it for about 3 months of usage.
Drupal is for me number one. The site is xhtml valid by default and you have only to optimize the content you write, the rest is pretty simple.
Google loves drupal, I don’t know exactly why but I think that the structure of Drupal headers, links etc makes it search engine friendly.
If you apply some meta tag optimization then the results will be much higher.
ya wordpress may require some initial changes to make the urls seo friendly and its not difficult as mentioned by Guy Vestal above.each and every cms has a way around being search engine friendly ,the important factor is how much are you comfortable working with a particular CMS ,rather than jumping to one or the other CMS because its SEO friendly and wasting some precious time to learn to use it ,its better to stick to CMS you can work with and use that time to develop content.I have heard of a few CMS which are much more search engine friendly than others but i havent used them so i dont know,have to check out DRUPAL tho’.
my 2 cents
great blog !!