When looking to publish a new site, many publishers may wonder
whether they need to use a CMS, and if so, how to ensure that it is
SEO-friendly.It is first essential to determine whether a CMS is necessary before
embarking on a web development project. You can use the flowchart in Figure 1 to help guide you
through the process. 
Due to the inexpensiveness of customizable, free platforms such as
Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and Mambo, it is increasingly rare
for a publisher to develop a static site, even when a CMS isn’t
required. The next step involves understanding how to ensure that a CMS will
be search-engine-friendly. Here is a list of basic SEO issues that
frequently plague CMSs (both prebuilt and custom-made). By dealing with
these, you will ensure a relatively smooth platform for content
delivery.
Title tag customization and rules A search-engine-friendly CMS must allow for title tags to not
only be customized on a page-specific level, but also enable rules
for particular sections of a website. For example, if the title tag
always has to start with your site name followed by a colon followed
by your article title, you’re sunk—at least as far as your SEO is
concerned. You should be able to revise the formulas used to
generate the title tags across your site to make them more
search-optimal.
Static, keyword-rich URLs URLs have historically been the most problematic SEO issue for
CMS platforms. Nowadays, search-friendly CMSs should feature custom
URL creation. In WordPress, a custom URL is referred to as a post
slug. Figure 2 is an
example from SEOmoz’s custom-built CMS. Notice how the first line allows you to create the title of
the post, and the second enables manual sculpting of the URL
structure (and an automatic Generate button if you prefer to simply
use the post title).
Meta tag customization Being able to implement custom meta descriptions and meta
robots tags is critical. Enabling
editorial control is essential for a good CMS.
Enabling custom HTML tags A good CMS has to offer extra functionality on HTML tags for
things such as NoFollow on links,
or <hx> tags for headlines
and subheadlines. These can be built-in features accessible through
menu options, or the CMS can simply allow a manual editing of HTML
in the text editor window when required. Having no H1 tags on a
given page is not desirable. Too many H1 tags on the page are not
desirable. Low-value content (such as the publication date) marked
up as an H1 is not desirable. The article title is typically the
best content to have wrapped in an H1.
Internal anchor text flexibility To be “optimized” rather than simply search-friendly,
customizing the anchor text on internal links is critical. Rather
than simply making all links in a site’s architecture the page’s
title, a great CMS should be flexible enough to handle custom input
from the administrators as to the anchor text of category-level or
global navigation links.
Intelligent categorization structure Another problem is poor category structure. When designing an
information architecture for a website, you should not place limits
on how pages are accessible due to the CMS’s inflexibility. CMSs
that offer customizable navigation panels will be the most
successful in this respect.
Pagination controls Pagination can be the bane of a website’s search rankings, so
controlling it through inclusion of more items per page, more
contextually relevant anchor text (e.g., not “next,” “prev,” and
page numbers), and careful use of NoFollow and meta NoIndex tags will make your important
content get more link juice and crawl attention.
301-redirect functionality Many CMSs sadly lack this critical feature, disallowing the
proper redirection of content when necessary; 301s are valuable for
expired content, for pages that have a newer version, and for
dodging keyword cannibalization issues similar to those we discussed
earlier in this chapter.
XML/RSS pinging Although it is primarily useful for blogs, any content, from
articles to products to press releases, can be issued in a feed, and
by utilizing quick, accurate pinging of the major feed services, you
limit some of your exposure to duplicate content spammers who pick
up your feeds and ping the major services quickly in the hopes of
beating you to the punch.
Image-handling and alt
attributes Alt attributes are a clear
must-have from an SEO perspective, serving as the “anchor text” when
an image is used as a link (note that text links are much better
than images with alt attributes
for links, but if you must use image links you do want to have the
alt attribute implemented), and
providing relevant, indexable content for the search engines. Images
in a CMS’s navigational elements should preferably use CSS image
replacement rather than mere alt
attributes.
CSS exceptions The application of CSS styles in a proper CMS should allow for
manual exceptions so that a user can modify how a strong headline or
list element appears visually. If the CMS does not offer this,
writers may opt out of using proper semantic markup for presentation
purposes, which would not be a good thing.
Static caching options Many CMSs currently offer caching options, which are a
particular boon if a page is receiving a high level of traffic from
social media portals or news sites. A bulky CMS often makes dozens
of extraneous database connections, which can overwhelm a server if
caching is not in place, killing potential inbound links and media
attention.
URLs free of tracking parameters and session IDs Sticking session or tracking information such as the user’s
click path into the URL is deadly for SEO. It usually leads to
incomplete indexation and duplicate content issues.
Customizable URL structure If the default URL structure of the CMS doesn’t suit your
needs, you should be able to change it. For example, if you don’t
want /archives/ in the URLs of all your
archived articles, you should be able to remove it. Or if you want
to reference the article name instead of the article’s database ID
in the URL, you should be able to do it.
301 redirects to a canonical URL Duplicate content is the bane of many a dynamic website owner.
Automatic handling of this by the CMS through the use of 301
redirects is a must.
Static-looking URLs The most palatable URLs to spiders are the ones that look like
they lead to static pages—no query strings in the URL.
Keywords in URLs Keywords in your URLs can help your rankings.
RSS feeds The CMS should auto-create RSS feeds to help your site rank in
Google Blog Search and other feed engines.
Tagging and tag clouds This Web 2.0 feature is powerful for SEO, thanks in large part
to the keyword-rich text links.
Multilevel categorization structure It is awfully limiting to your site structure and internal
hierarchical linking structure to have a CMS that doesn’t allow you
to nest subcategories into categories, sub-subcategories into
subcategories, and so on.
Paraphrasable excerpts Duplicate content issues are exacerbated on dynamic sites such
as blogs when the same content is displayed on Permalink pages,
category pages, archives-by-date pages, tag pages, and the home
page. Crafting unique content for the excerpt and having that
content display on all locations except for the Permalink page will
help strengthen your Permalink page as unique content.
Breadcrumb navigation Breadcrumb (drill-down) navigation is great for SEO because it
reinforces your internal hierarchical linking structure with
keyword-rich text links.
Meta NoIndex tags for
low-value pages Even if you use NoFollow
attributes in links to these pages, other people may still link to
them, which carries a risk of ranking those pages above some of your
more valuable content.
Keyword-rich intro copy on category-level pages Keyword-rich introductory copy helps set a stable keyword
theme for the page, rather than relying on the latest article or
blog post to be the most prominent text on the page.
NoFollow links in
comments If you allow visitors to post comments and do not
NoFollow the links, your site will be a spam
magnet. Heck, you’ll probably be a spam magnet anyway, but you won’t
risk losing PageRank to spammers if you use NoFollow attributes.
Customizable anchor text on navigational links “Contact,” “About Us,” “Read More,” “Full Article,” and so on
make for lousy anchor text—at
least from an SEO standpoint. Hopefully, your CMS allows you to
improve such links to make the anchor text more
keyword-rich.
XML Sitemap generator Having your CMS generate your XML Sitemap can save a lot of
hassle, as opposed to trying to generate one with a third-party
tool.
XHTML validation Although HTML validation is not a ranking signal, it is
desirable to have the CMS automatically check for malformed HTML, as
search engines may end up seeing a page differently from how it
renders on the screen and accidentally consider navigation to be
part of the content or vice versa.
Pingbacks, trackbacks, comments, and antispam mechanisms The problem with comments/trackbacks/pingbacks is that they
are vectors for spam, so if you have one or more of these features
enabled, you will be spammed. Therefore, effective spam prevention
in the form of Akismet, Mollom, or Defensio is a must.
If you want more information on picking a quality CMS, some great
web resources are already out there, among them http://www.opensourcecms.com and http://www.cmsmatrix.org, to help manage this task. 1. Selecting a CMSThere are many factors to consider when choosing an existing CMS.
Many CMSs are free, but some of them are proprietary with a license cost
per site. The majority of CMSs were not designed with security,
stability, search friendliness, and scalability in mind, though in
recent years a few vendors have developed excellent CMSs that have
search friendliness as their primary focus. Many were developed to fit a
certain market niche, but can be expanded to fit other purposes. Some
are no longer maintained. Many are supported and developed primarily by
hobbyists who don’t particularly care if you’re having trouble getting
them installed and configured. Some are even intentionally made to be
difficult to install and configure so that you’ll be encouraged to pay
the developers a consulting fee to do it all for you. Once your CMS is up and running, ease of administration is a
consideration. For instance, the CMS MODx would be very tough for a
newbie to administer compared to Blogger.com. If you just want to get
content on the Web, Blogger will do about 90% of the most important SEO
features, and any nontechnical user can use it—which makes it really
attractive compared to MODx. Selecting a CMS is an important process. If you make the wrong
choice, you will doom your site to failure. Like most software, CMSs are
a moving target—what’s missing today may be a new feature tomorrow. In
addition, just because a feature exists doesn’t mean it is the default
option, so in many instances the desired functionality will need to be
enabled and possibly customized to work to your specifications. 2. Third-Party CMS Add-onsMany CMS platforms offer many third-party plug-ins or add-ons that
extend the core functionality of the CMS. In the WordPress plug-in
directory alone there are nearly 6,000 plug-ins. Plug-ins provide a
simple way to add new SEO features and functionality, making the CMS
much more flexible and future-proof. It is particularly helpful when
there is an active community developing plug-ins. An active community
also comes in very handy in providing free technical support when things
go wrong; and when bugs and security vulnerabilities crop up, it is
important to have an active developer base to solve those issues
quickly. CMS add-ons can also come in the form of independent software
installed on your web server or hosted services. Such tools come in many
forms, discussion forums, customer reviews, and user polls. Discussion
forums, for example, come in two forms, with bbPress, which is installed
software and is optimized for search, and vbulletin, which is a hosted
solution and therefore more difficult to optimize for search. The problem with hosted solutions is that you are helping to build
the service providers’ link authority and not your own, and you have
much less control over optimizing the content. Some hosted solutions can
pose even bigger problems if the content and functionality are embedded
into your site with JavaScript. Examples of this are leading customer
review solutions such as BazaarVoice and PowerReviews. One novel solution to the JavaScript problem is to execute the
JavaScript, extract the content from its encrypted form, and present it
in plain-text format so that the search engines can see it. This does
require programming expertise to execute, but one tool that allows you
to do this in a more automated fashion is Netconcepts’ GravityStream.
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