By Elmer on June 22, 2009

Many Content Management Systems (CMS) were built without regard for search engines. Some have pretty bad handling of redirections, others generate pretty ugly URLs. Search engines and CMS makers often have disconnected ideas. I don’t know why such important elements in making a CMS sell are neglected to a point that buyers end up fixing CMS packages to make them search engine friendly.

Importance of a search engine friendly CMS
From its name, a content management system allows website administrators to manage content of a website in a more structured way. With a CMS, it is now easier to add, delete and update entries such as articles, photos or products on a website. This is quite a big relief compared to updating multiple pages for certain changes. But if such convenience comes at the expense of search engine visibility then it offsets the whole purpose of serving the pages to the public.

Requirements for a search engine friendly CMS
1. Provision of Title and Meta Description fields. Each page has unique content and therefore should have its own individual page title and meta description associated to it. Having these two fields helps CMS operators set attributes that make each page unique from each other.

2. Ability to embed header (<h1>) tag on headers and subheaders <h2>, <h3>, etc.

3. Ability to generate/update sitemap file every time a new entry has been made. For example, if I have a new iPod product range to sell in my website, the CMS should be able to update the sitemap.xml without my intervention.

4. Properly control URL structure. If I need to change the URL of a CMS entry, I can do it. Besides that, generated URLs should contain keywords extracted from the theme of the page. And no session codes please.

5. Proper redirection. In the event that I have to merge products, or delete one of them, the CMS takes care of properly redirecting visitors to the intended pages. This doesn’t mean any redirection method that works. It should be search engine friendly too, like 301 permanent redirects.

6. Support for breadcrumbs. Content defined within a CMS is structured in a way that it is possible for CMS to generate them in a dynamic way. Breadcrumbs provide search engine robots with alternative paths to follow while crawling our pages.

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