Selecting your CMS the SEO Way

Lot of website owners prefer to use CMS or Content Management System for their websites because it makes their website management much easier than having to use unfamiliar products such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage to edit, add or delete pages. It is possible to add fresh content, new pages, edit existing pages and delete pages using CMS. With so many powerful open source CMS tools available for our free use, it is difficult to resist the temptation. However, there are certain disadvantages in using CMS tools and these disadvantages are directly linked to SEO. Optimizing your website becomes lot more complicated when it uses a CMS.

One of the drawbacks of CMS is the random generation of the URLs. If you are in the process of selecting your CMS make sure it is a system that allows you to create your own URLs for the pages that you add to the website. As we all know search engines don’t fancy URLs with endless special characters and URLs that are complicated.

Secondly, when you are selecting your CMS make sure it has the capability to work with both graphic image links and text links. By using only text links, you can make your website look very dry and unappealing to the visitors and this may lead to people getting out of your website as soon as they get in.

If you are not sure what exactly to look for when you are selecting your CMS, then you will do well to get some help from an SEO expert. Many CMS companies advertise themselves as to provide SEO friendly CMS; you need to double check what exactly they mean by search engine friendly. It is better to ask your questions before spending your money if you are going for paid CMS tools or to review the support or FAQs section if you are using an open source CMS tool.

Sometimes the pages that your CMS creates cannot be seen by the search engines and there is no point having a website if it cannot feature in search results. See to that your CMS allows you to create your own unique title to the pages and page description. Most CMS tools today have rectified this problem; however you should not lay your hands on the wrong tool so make sure to double check. These are some of the very basic factors of SEO. Though they are basic factors they are highly important to the success of your website online.

Initially, the CMS tools were designed to make website management easy and simple. So they did not have all the finer details of SEO in mind while designing. After facing problems with SEO, most second generation CMS tools have managed to take care of most of the basic problems. So you need not totally avoid CMS but you just need to be cautious with your choice of CMS.

SubmitEdge