Editorial Articles

One of the key decisions an online business needs to make is which Content Management System (CMS) to use, whether to build one internally, or indeed whether to use one at all. This can represent a complex decision-making process as the outcome affects critical things such as how your staff engage with your own site, how much flexibility you will have over your pages (greater isn’t always better), your development costs, backend integration options, and more.

One of the more overlooked implications is how this choice affects your current and future natural search rankings. Essentially, your choice of CMS has a direct impact on lots of site variables that directly impact search engine optimisation (SEO); how your meta data is managed, how URLs are published, what they look like, how your sitemaps and navigation operate, etc. All these have an SEO dimension; get any of these seriously wrong and you’ll ruin your chances of dominating your natural search space at the starting blocks. Conversely, getting them right from the start provides a solid platform from which to build your SEO cost-effectively.

For example, a CMS will typically manage a site’s sessions and cookies. Many off-the-shelf CMS’ will require the visiting user’s Internet browser to accept persistent cookies before they can access product pages. This works fine for ordinary users but the visiting search engine spiders aren’t ordinary users and can’t accept persistent cookies. The CMS would then reject the search engines’ entry into the site, essentially not allowing the search engine to take any pages from the site and store them in their respective indexes. A site with a million product pages for instance would therefore not be found if any of those million product pages were searched for in any of the search engines!

Another good example is how CMS’ typically manage meta data (i.e. the specification of a page’s meta title, keywords, and description). Whilst these elements have limited impact on your rankings nowadays, the meta title for a page is what a prospective customer will see as the clickable title of your listing in the search results, and on that basis the meta title represents a key element that needs optimisation to maximise your click-through rates. CMS’ can sometimes cause problems here by not allowing a marketing team to change those titles for each individual page, or automatically creating them with some basis, poorly conceived logic, that fails to merchandise satisfactorily.

Many CMS’ do exist that go a long way to comply with the points made above and with other key SEO variables. The best, ironically, are the free CMS platforms like Drupal and Wordpress. But even in those cases, whilst they might be search engine friendly, search engine friendliness alone won’t get you rankings. Complying with best practice, which is what search engine friendliness actually is, simply makes your site accessible to the search engines and loosely communicates to them that you are relevant for what you offer or sell.

What you need however, is to convince the search engines that you are the most relevant site on the Internet for what you want to rank for and not just ‘relevant’. This takes more than just friendliness; it takes comprehensive tailoring of your site on a page-by-page basis and creative, proactive, scalable link building, all of which a CMS really can’t help you with.

That said, getting the foundations right is a critical first phase so how you approach your content management needs some serious consideration. Make sure therefore that SEO friendliness is a line item on that checklist.

Author: Andreas Pouros, Chief Operating Officer, Greenlight Search