By Elmer on February 23, 2009

Web Content Management System or generally called CMS, is an online application used to manage dynamic website content such as HTML, images and other documents. It is intended for users who have little or no programming knowledge to easily create, edit and manage online contents such as articles, news or blogs with relative ease. If you are a webmaster whose boss often asks you to update your website, a CMS installed in your server will help you fulfill your tasks without costing as much time as you would if you do the updates manually. You can create HTML pages without actually coding HTML tags. Indeed, using CMS helps you become more productive and work more efficiently.

However, many CMS were built without much consideration of their impact on how pages they built will be visible in search engines. In short, many CMS in the market are not search engine friendly. Therefore, we need to examine the following areas of a CMS product that could be detrimental to our web content in the eyes of search engines.

URL Structure
Easily, this is one of the most visible areas we can observe in a CMS output. Search engines love URLs that don’t have complicated structure because they can easily navigate from one page to another. Search engines also love keyword-rich URLs (and not those with perpetual combination of alphanumeric characters) because they’ll have a better idea about the page. So if our URL output looks like this one:

www.domain.com/MA147LL-A_W0QQitemZ40002511mdZViewItemQQptZ?hash=item40002511;_trkparms=7%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C24

it looks like our CMS needs some fixing. On the other hand, if our our URL looks similar to the following: www. domain.com/shop/electronics/ipod/ipod-shuffle-1gb/features.html, then chances are our CMS took care of ensuring it allows usage of keyword-rich URL elements. One good (or rather required?) feature for CMS is to include a field that allows users to choose what URL they would like to see in the output page. This is much better than relying on arbitrary series of alphanumeric characters CMS packages are likely to spit out.

Custom Page Title and Meta Description
Another important field content management systems should consider is that individual pages should generate their unique version of page title and meta description. I discussed last week that custom page title and meta description are important elements for search engines to evaluate individual pages for ranking. CMS should have the ability to generate these custom titles by way of extracting database fields as variables or follow rule sets defined by users.

For example, if I have a press release page, I would like to have the title of the release as the title of the web page so that each press release will have a unique page title. On the other hand, if I have a brochure site that contains 5,000 different products in my electronics shop, I can define a rule set “[Product Name] and other [Category Name] at Elmer’s Electronics House” for CMS to follow in generating custom page title. One of its possible output looks like this one: “iPod Shuffle 2G and other MP3 Players at Elmer’s Electronics House”. So now I don’t have to go through each product page and make necessary edits.

Other On-Page / Website Elements
In addition to page title and meta description, other on-page elements CMS should support are:

1. Ability to insert an ALT text value for images
2. Ability to insert link on any anchor text defined
3. Ability to generate and update sitemap page for new content additions
4. Ability to generate sitemap.xml file for new content additions
5. Ability to handle redirects from one page to another, in cases where pages are deleted or moved to another URL.

Customizing CMS requires programming skills and is not the same as merely using it, so it would be more practical to leave it to experts. (BeansBox offers building custom CMS service, by the way). So before we invest on any CMS package out there in the market, let’s inquire CMS vendors on how they handle web page elements I discussed above.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites