Affordable content management systems have only recently become a real alternative to building websites with expert developer tools. Countless CMSs have recently been thrown into the market, seeming to offer a solid base for developing websites including all the bells and whistle features you want to have.
But on a closer look, you find that there are still many of them that are not SEO friendly. This is mostly the case for in-house solutions – ones where the internet agency was just not able to keep up with the rapid changes in the industry – but also the case with semi-professional systems that outright lack SEO features.
What changed?
With the introduction of dynamic page generation via a CMS, there is no need for the old boring folder hierarchy that ends with a file name such as, contact.html. Every page is now generated in one place and all content comes from a database. Developers have been very happy about this since it makes maintenance a lot easier but they overlooked the fact that search engines love to read URLs and make sense out of them.
In other words a URL like "/Advisors/Montreal/Anthony-Layton" has a lot more meaning to a search engine than "page.aspx?id=7457".
You might have noticed in the past that this practice is particularly used with shopping carts.
State-of-the-art systems
Nowadays, CMSs have URL rewriting engines built in that let the editor control the URL in the same way he or she controls the title of a page. And in most cases, the URL is created from the page title or headline.
To achieve superior SEO results your CMS should give you also control over these features:
- Custom title tag creation
- Possibility of naming documents, such as PDFs
- A style sheet based editor that creates CSS compliant tags such as h1, h2, etc.
- Complete control over alternative tags of images
- Complete meta tag creation, not just limited to keywords and description
- Complete control over your HTML structure, to make sure that the actual content comes as high as possible in your code (There is a difference between your code and what you actually see.)
Multi-language problems
Another problem can arise with multi-lingual websites. Some systems display language specific content based on cookies. This means that a site has a defined default language and if you switch the language, you will end up on exactly the same page (URL). It's only because of your browser cookie that the server delivers you the content in this second language.
But since search engine spiders do not accept cookies you will lose a lot of indexing potential.
Further Reading
SEO and CMS:How will a CMS impact my SEO efforts?
Static HTML vs Dynamic URLs
Embedding SEO Best Practices in CMS Implementations