Does CMS help or hamper SEO efforts?

CMS stands for Content Management System. Most of the websites that are designed today are integrated with a CMS and having a CMS integrated to your website you can easily update your website. If you want to make minor changes or add new pages your website you don’t have to hunt for a web design company to do this job for you and sometimes it is difficult to find companies that are ready to take up miscellaneous jobs like minor updates. So CMS is a great help for webmasters who like to update their site now and then without having to hire a web design company.

Most website owners who ask for a CMS keeping future needs in mind are not aware of the effects of a CMS on their website’s SEO. Though you can easily update your website and new content fast, there are lot of disadvantages in terms of SEO. When you integrate a website to your website the pages that are created through CMS are dynamic and dynamic pages are not search engine friendly.

The URLs are automatically generated through CMS and they have special characters in them and look complex. Such complicated URLs neither help human users nor the search engine spiders. Complicated URL structures set-off warning alarm when the search engine spiders crawl the pages. Secondly, search engines always limit the number of dynamic pages it can index. Most often you will have no control on the URLs that are generated. By using this dynamically generated you put yourself in a very disadvantaged position. You lose out on the advantage that you can get out of keyword rich URLs. Even when the CMS allows you to modify the URL, you will not be at total liberty to insert keyword rich URLs.

Another major problem is the insertion of unique title and description data for each dynamic page. As you would know keyword rich URL and Meta tags of the page play a great role in search engine SERP ranking. These are the data that tell the search engines whether your website is a good match for the search that is made by the users.

When the pages are generated dynamically, search engine wise, they have very unfriendly design. Excessive use of images that replace the text, script based navigation, excessive use of AJAX coding etc are certain to hamper your SEO efforts. So if you really want to have a search engine friendly website you must avoid using a CMS as much as possible. If you have a shopping cart then you have no other option but to use a CMS to add delete and edit products. However, on the other hand when you have just a brochure website, you don’t have to necessarily go for a CMS that will be potentially bad for your website.

Today you can get CMS systems that are search engine friendly. When you use such CMS software you must make sure that you can make the necessary changes to the pages without having to seek help from programmers or designers whenever you want to update your website.

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