cmsXperts

With many search engine specialists agreeing that using a content management system to build your website can penalize its position in search results, webmasters need to take great care in choosing a CMS that allows for an effective search engine optimization without penalizing the ease of use of the tool.

Main SEO Issues of Content Management Systems

Some of the most often cited issues include:

• Bad META tags: not all CMS allow webmasters to edit the META tags for every single page or blog post being published, and many webmasters tend to simply ignore this, hoping they will get sorted automatically;
• Keyword poor URLs: on some systems, such as WordPress, webmasters can customize the format in which new page URLs are being displayed, for instance including the article title itself (which is generally a good practice). However, not every CMS does, forcing the site to use progressive numbering or other arbitrary fields instead;
• Dynamic URLs: search engine specialists agree that dynamic URLs don’t get indexed by Web spiders as fast as static URLs. For instance, a dynamic URL such as www.sample.com/page.php?id=32 usually tends to be less Google-friendly than www.sample.com/page32.php.
• Peruse of SPAN tags to set links and paragraphs styles, which tends to clutter the page code, making it slower to load and harder to parse for the spiders. More in general, CMS can use text in images, script or AJAX based navigation that can result almost impossible for Web spiders to index correctly and completely.

Best SEO Practices for CMS

When choosing your CMS, the main factors you should be looking at if what you care about the most is search engine optimization are:

• W3C-compliant code: a page that is coded to match W3C (X)HTML standards is a guarantee that it will be parsed by all search engine spiders correctly: while Google needs to be able to parse non-compliant pages as well, the Google homepage itself not respecting the standard, complying to the W3C directions ensures that even the smaller search engines, whose spiders aren’t quite as elaborate as Google’s, will have no particular problem indexing it;
• Text-based navigational links: Flash or other complicated navigational links are, again, hard to understand for the Web spider. When image-based, the CMS should allow you to set the ALT tag, which you should fill with a descriptive text;
• URL customization capabilities: as explained before, it’s important to be able to set static, keyword-rich titles for your pages. Some experts also suggest that the lower your pages reside in your site hierarchy, the more their importance tends to be discounted by search engines: for this reason, it might be a good practice to be able to publish your pages all under the same directory;
• Reducing of code clutter: the CMS should use cascading style sheets as much as possible and avoid peruse of SPAN tags, which will speed up the page load speed considerably. JavaScript code should also be contained into separate files rather than in the page itself, to allow for a better code caching.

Some experts will say that the best SEO practice for CMS is simply making sure you’re not using one. However, it would seem that content management systems are now gradually shifting towards a better and better search engine optimization, also thanks to third-party tools.

For webmasters using WordPress, the recently released “All in One SEO Pack” is certainly a big step forward in this direction, taking care of automatic title and META tags optimization and avoiding some of the duplicate content to be found on WordPress blogs.