The Best CMS for SEO

What is the best CMS (Content Management System) if you want to rank high in search engines? Good question - I'm glad I asked!

So you want a CMS so that you can update the content on your website yourself and do it often. Great. We agree, it's the way to go. But which one do you choose? There's WordPress, which is good but is it just good for a blog or can you (or should you) build a corporate website with blogging software? There's also a flurry of other CMS software out there like Drupal, Joomla!, OpenCMS, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, TYPO3, or XOOPS? Should you go Open Source or buy from a vendor where you get more support (maybe) but pay more?

The answer is, you want a CMS that is easy to use, has good support and also has the SEO features that you need. Here are some good articles:

Choose Your CMS With Care

With a poor CMS selection you can truly ruin your chances of success. The reason for this is that SEO is a relatively new discipline and most CMS systems were created before SEO was an important consideration. As a consequence, the product managers and software developers who created most CMS systems did not have SEO on their radar. In addition, SEO friendly website code has no real direct relationship to smart coding practices.

Building SEO Momentum by Using A Consistent Site Structure

One of the biggest problems in the field of SEO for enterprise-level sites is content management. Product lines, editorial calendars, marketing, and content management systems often dictate that pieces and parts of a site are organized in a sub-optimal way and/or move locations.

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The 10 year old document is as relevant today as the day it was published. And perhaps even more so since search is the primary mode of navigation on the web.

So you need:

• Control of meta data
• No duplicate content URLs
• Search engine friendly (SEF) URLs
• Non-dynamic URLs
• Automatic creation of SEF URLs
• Automatic creation of keyword links
• A consistent site structure
• A way to archive old articles without them getting in the way

I think some newspaper websites really don't get it. They remove articles that were once on their site. Why? To save space? Space is cheap. Inbound links are not cheap. Why jumble up Google by removing pages that were once indexed. (Sorry, this was a side note but had to be said.)

So these are all good features and what you need in your CMS for SEO to work. Guess what? The CMS we use does all of this - and does it well. We've been able to tweak it to work the right way. Our clients are seeing great search engine rankings.

-Tony