SEO Step-By-Step Guide – 177. How to select an SEO friendly CMS?

We are moving more and more towards CMS based websites. There are number of reasons for this changing trend which is not really the interest of this post. Here we are concerned about how to make the right decision with regard to our CMS. At onetime,

CMS or content management systems were considered to be very unfriendly to the search engines. Today that is not the case we can find a number of CMS tools that are developed paying attention to SEO requirements. Here are some factors that you should take into consideration.

One of the major drawbacks of the olden day CMS tools were that they URLs generated were dynamic and search engines detested dynamic URL. However, many CMS platforms generate static URLs. So your primary concern should be about getting a CMS that can generate static URLs.

The second important SEO factor is the page title. Your CMS should allow you to create new page titles for each page and edit the page titles of the existing pages. Thirdly, your CMS should allow you to add HTML hard codes in to your page content and the HTML tags that you use within the content section should work.

Your CMS should have fields for adding meta data in the backend so that you can insert meta keywords and meta description and other relevant meta data to your pages. In addition, it should be capable of creating consistent breadcrumb links automatically on each page depending on the path of the page.

It should avoid using JAVA script and inline CSS as much as possible. In particular it should not use frames in your layout. Many CMS tools available in the market provide useful information such as SEO statistics of your web pages. Choose a CMS with such features and it will be highly helpful in keeping track of your website’s SEO success.

Above all, your CMS should create W3C compliant pages and it should also take care of cross browser compatibility. If your CMS does not take care of this feature, then you will lose a lot of visitors. Originally most CMS supported only IE today with more and more people using diverse browsers, it is important to find a CMS that creates pages that are compatible with all the popular browser types.

Additional SEO friendly features include the ability to add ALT attributes. Ability to create custom 404 pages, the ability to set 301 redirects from the backend, etc. If the CMS that you choose should have a demo, you must make sure to try it before you invest your money. Only if they have all the above search engine friendly features, you must select that CMS, if not try looking for another CMS.

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