Choosing the Right CMS for SEO
Choosing a Content Management System for your website is an important consideration, especially when you plan to have SEO. A successful SEO campaign is best built on the firm foundation of a high quality website, so make the right choice when selecting a CMS and you could dramatically improve your website’s chances in the rankings.
In this day and age it is becoming increasingly rare for a company or website owner to choose a static site because of how flexible and cost effective it can be to use one of the many free platforms available such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. But how do you know that the CMS you have selected is ready to support your SEO?
What to Look For
There are a number of important factors to take into account when choosing a suitable SEO-friendly CMS. Below is a list of features that we recommend you look for to ensure that your website will rank in the search engines:
- Ability to edit title tags and assign rules based on what section of the website you are on.
- Creating URLs that are clean and keyword rich – a feature that a lot of CMS platforms lack, it is essential that these are clearly readable to search engines
- Ability to customise meta tags – especially meta description and robots tags. Or better yet an area to add all meta data in as necessary
- Control over pagination to combat internal duplicate content issues
- 301 Redirect feature to deal with expired content and newer versions of pages
- Option to add and edit alt and title attributes for image and anchor tags
- Manual CSS exceptions to prevent content uploaders from opting out of using semantic markup in favour of appearance
The above points should feature in all CMS if the intention is for the website to perform for SEO.
Do your research and keep these tips in mind when you are choosing your Content Management System, and you will give your website the best chance of SEO success.
January 15th, 2013
Some really good advice in there Dennis it’s quite interesting seeing differences in conversion between pages with obvious signs of trust particularly the physical address and real land-line number (as opposed to a free phone or cellphone only)