In search of a Content Management System (CMS)
Not so long ago, owning a content management system (CMS) was a luxury available to only a privileged few organizations. In the early 90’s, most commercially available CMS’ were priced in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. To most, a CMS simply didn’t make sense economically or otherwise. As a result and as a matter of course, we would inform our web clients that their basic needs could easily be met by something we called “poor man’s content management” – a rudimentary collection of data-driven pages and associated administration tools written in ASP or PHP. Unlike modern content management systems, PM-CMS (my new acronym) focused only on those sections of a web site that were most likely to change over time such as news and press.
Fast-forward 15 or so years and there are literally hundreds of documented content management systems available, the vast majority of which are open source and free of charge. There are as many variations of CMS as there are colors in the rainbow – so many that a cottage industry sprung up just to help you determine which CMS best suits your need. Not satisfied there were enough, we even decided to build our own CMS.
Ok, so now that I got in that shameless plug, let’s get back to the topic at hand… search! Wait a minute. You thought this was about CMS? Well, if you’re really interested in comparing CMS’, check out this site which does a great job. But before you do, I would suggest that you put SEO at the top of the list of evaluation criteria – because when it comes to SEO, CMS’ are definitely not created equal. Here are a few of the key search features you should look for:
Title overrides – a large number of content management systems simply re-purpose the menu titles and use them to generate page titles. While adequate in some cases, these short titles don’t fully take advantage of a key ingredient to SEO success. Google provides for titles up to 66 characters in length to be displayed in the search results. Title overrides will allow you to maximize your titles, making them keyword rich and more enticing to potential visitors.
SEO-friendly URLs – avoid any CMS that uses cryptic URLs. Visitors can’t read them and Google doesn’t like them either. If a CMS doesn’t have SEO-friendly URLs built in, there may be a possibility that a third party add-on exists. If you are migrating from an existing CMS or even a static site, you will also want to consider how to migrate your old URLs to the new URLs. In addition to automatically generating SEO-friendly URLs, our in-house CMS affords users the ability to build a lookup table of friendly URLs so they can create aliases for pages on their site or redirect to pages on remote sites.
Meta tags optimization – Make sure the CMS you choose has the ability to create and modify the meta keywords and description fields. While few search engines these days rely on meta keywords, the meta description is what Google displays when your page shows up in search results. When you do manage to come up high in search rankings, you want to present a message that speaks directly to your target audience. Without a meta description, you’re leaving this to chance.
Standard Sitemap Generation – Sitemaps are XML files that provide a way of informing search engines about pages that are available for crawling. Once fully indexed, search engines will periodically re-index select pages on your site at periodic intervals. By informing search engines like Google of the pages that exist on your site and more importantly, when they have changed, you’ll make their work easy for them and they will love you in return. Within the Sitemap 0.90 protocol, a protocol widely supported by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft is a tag, <lastmod>. The lastmod tag indicates when a page has changed and hence, informs search engines which pages are candidates for re-indexing. While a standard sitemap doesn’t ensure your site/pages will rank high, it does ensure that search engines will re-index your site early and often. How often you ask? Well, as of the writing of this article, I see that Google last peeked at my sitemap 13 hours ago – that’s approximately 20 minutes after I made the last update to the site.
So don’t forget to emphasize search the next time you search for a CMS!
Tags: CMS, SEO, web development, XML Sitemap