bacaartikeldisiniaja -- Content management systems, or CMS for short, have been around the web for some time, but until recently very few were considered search engine friendly.
The basics of most CMS systems are simple.
First, create a template that will be used to display the page. One template is generally sufficient for the entire website. From there, add content to your page using the provided software. This usually means populating some kind of dashboard with content.
After completion, the data is written to the database. Typically, when a website visitor requests a page, the page is built "on the fly" by retrieving the appropriate data from a database and displaying it in a template.
With this description of the CMS system in mind, we should consider what the CMS can do for the system. Therefore, CMS providers have to answer a few questions.
How search engine friendly is the CMS system?
There are a few CMS which are designed with search engines in mind. By search engine friendly one must know if it support unique meta tags for each page and are these tags easily modified? Can the CMS display static pages or does it require session variables and other dynamic variables to work properly? Can one apply a customizable file structure to the system or is it set to a default? In other words, can the system organize files in the top 2 or 3 folders, or does it bury content in some long obscure path like:
http://www.somesite.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/yet-another-folder/why-not-one-more-folder/filename.htm?
If the answer no to any of the above questions is “no”, then other options should be considered. Here is why:
Search engines consider the folder depth when assigning values such as link popularity and inheritance. And while you can minimize link popularity loss through effective navigation, ultimately the folder depth will impact your performance.
This goes back to the “old days” of the web, when many sites were hand coded and file and folder structure were managed by the webmaster.
Generally, less important content, or content which changed infrequently, was placed deeper in the site. Search engines soon figured this out, so appropriately assigned value to those pages. As such they continue to use this logic today when assigning values to pages.
Does the system support unique meta tags?
A site need unique meta tags because pages perform better on search engines if they are all unique – that not only means unique text content but unique meta tags that match the text content. The CMS should also have the ability to easily go in and modify the meta tags and content to help improve search engine rankings, and ultimately traffic (and hopefully sales).
Does the system support static pages?
One wants the pages to appear static to the search engines and be able to display without any types of session variable, or other identifiers needed to help build the pages.
Not only will search engine spiders tend to leave a site when they see “seesionid” (because session ids tend to catch them in a never ending loop on the site) but the static pages tend to perform better in search results than dynamic pages. Even more so in highly or even moderately competitive search markets.
How flexible is the folder structure?
One should have the ability to organize the files the way they see fit. Ideally, it would be best if all the pages could reside in the root folder, or at the very least one should have the ability to organize them in subfolders off the root. It is generally accepted that all the site’s pages be no more than 3 folders deep. This is because the deeper the pages reside, the lower their relevancy is considered to be by the search engines.
What platform does the CMS need to run on?
Some CMS are built to run on a Linux or UNIX server while others are designed for a Microsoft IIS platform. Therefore the decision one makes on the CMS depends on what hosting has already been arranged (if any). If hosting hasn’t already been arranged, then there is more flexibility in the choice of system
What kind of customer service does the CMS company offer?
In other words, can the CMS provider build custom modules, or is the system limited to only what they sell? In many cases people will think they had purchased the perfect CMS only to find later that they needed features which were not available to them. In these cases, one may have to hire an independent programmer to build the custom application, which can get expensive.
