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Content
Management Systems and search engine optimization (SEO)
used to be mutually exclusive terms. But the SEO community
has been driving the developers of Content Management Systems
to integrate more SEO-friendly methodology within their
systems.
Content Management
Systems (CMS) are a hot topic right now with many corporate
websites are turning to these systems to handle thousands
of pages of dynamic data that they need to update regularly.
Content Management Systems allow information to be added,
edited or deleted automatically over the entire website.
This can save hundreds of hours in manual updates. Pages
of content are generated on the fly using a template driven
system.
When Content
Management Systems were first developed, most had little
regard for the requirements of search engine optimization.
For some Content Management Systems this still holds true.
Most CMS's, however, now have workarounds to accommodate
those wanting to perform search engine optimization on their
websites. The workarounds in the Content Management Systems
involve two areas: writing search engine friendly URL's
and creating individualized title and meta tags per page.
Writing Search
Engine Friendly URL's
Some search
engines (SE's) and directories like Google and Yahoo! can
now read dynamic URL's but there are still a fair amount
which can't or can only partially read them. The SE's like
to see pages that have unique content per page and may limit
the number of variable strings (i.e. ?, =. &) in a URL
to assure unique content.
By using a web
server module called Mod_Rewrite it is possible to remove
the stop characters from the URL string, thus making it
more SE-friendly. To do this you will need to add a rule
to the .htaccess file. For more information, see the following
article on the Apache website: http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
Creating
Individualized Title and Meta Tags
Some Content
Management Systems such the latest release from Hot Banana
Software boast full integration with SEO performance such
as offering Conversion Tracking tools, Robots.txt and Meta
Tag Management. Other CMS's, such as PostNuke.com, are struggling
to catch up and offer workarounds to make their system more
flexible and SE-friendly.
PostNuke.com
says that their next version (.8 release at this writing)
will be fully SEO compliant. Until then, they recommend
the pnMeta module, which will give control over the title,
keyword and description tags over an individual page. Dynamically
generated meta tag information, however, is not recommended.
For more information see: http://www.miragelab.com/News+article-sid-19.phtml
What Does
CMS Mean For SEO's?
Search engine
optimization experts and others using SEO techniques will
need to work closely with Webmasters and developers who
use Content Management Systems on their web properties.
This collaborative effort is necessary to insure that URL's
are SE-friendly and that unique title and meta tags are
served up for each optimized page. A large website with
tons of valuable content, should rank well in the search
engines according to the SE's guidelines and the CMS technology
would do well not to inhibit this, but rather would do well
to promote good search engine rankings for large websites.
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