B2B and B2C Seeking CMS friendly with SEO, ASAP!
Sounds like a personal ad on Craigslist, doesn't it? Quite the contrary... listen up, website owners. This is an article you don't want to miss.
On Monday, Eric Enge posted a great article on Content Management Systems (CMS), and how important it is to "Choose Your CMS With Care."
"With Care..." what does this mean?
Well, Enge emphasized the significance of choosing a CMS that not only compliments your ongoing SEO campaign, but enhances it. Chances are your company spends a lot of time and money optimizing on and off page content. How frustrating would it be if an element of your site designed to boost efficiency, your own CMS, was actually working against your optimization efforts? Treason! And yet, it happens every day.
Below is a brief summary of the three problems Enge discusses that can work against your SEO all because of a pre-historic CMS. They counteract three very common and very useful SEO techniques. Integrate a dusty, clunky, inefficient Content Management System into your website, and you could miss out on these opportunities, and a lot more.
Presenting: Eric Enge's three "dire consequences that can occur when you choose a CMS that's not search friendly."
1) "Massive duplicate content issues."
Certain Content Management Systems index the same page on your website under multiple URLs. From there, they might use these different URLs to point back to that same page. What's the drawback? Duplicate content. It's a waste of time for you AND for search engines- spiders crawling the same page for every different URL your CMS generates? I don't think so. All that extra time spent indexing duplicate content is time not spent indexing unique pages on your site, as Enge smartly points out.
2) "No control over meta data."
Other Content Management systems don't believe in giving you the option to create your own meta data. That's just nonsense. "Imagine every page of your site with the exact same title tag," Enge writes. "Title tags are the most important on-page SEO factor you have complete control over," so to choose a CMS that doesn't give you this freedom is absolutely absurd. Enge continues, "Imagine every page of your site with the same meta description tag." Though he highlights that meta descriptions don't have weight in page rankings, they do have a sway over browsers. These descriptions are some of the first things browsers see on the SERPs next to your link. Why give up a simple opportunity to reel in a web surfer for the sake of a controlling CMS?
3) "Dynamic URLs that change over time."
For search engines, crawling, ranking, and indexing websites is a continual process. Have you ever heard of a web spider sleeping on the job? As Enge points out, dynamic URLs are often changing. An inadequate CMS will not facilitate this, leading spiders to a 404 page, and leaving search engines stumped. Just as with duplicate content, your finicky CMS will require the spiders to spend extra time searching for the new URLs of your pages, and as Enge writes, "rediscovering the page could take months." Who's got that sort of time?
The Long-and-Short of it:
Enge mentions that if you've integrated a bogus CMS, comprehensive replacement is a possibility. A time-consuming, expensive possibility, but a possibility nonetheless.
Before you fall into that trap, take your time researching Content Management Systems before you integrate one into your website. Look for one that is SEO Friendly so it works with your structured, productive, and rewarding SEO campaign, not against it!
Not in the mood to do your homework on SEO Friendly Content Management Systems? Check out Part II of this post. It's all about the SEO Friendly CMS envisioned, created, and embedded by the team of expert developers at Hudson Horizons.