Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) to maximise SEO value

Choosing a suitable Content Management System is a critical issue for any new web development project and important for boosting and maximising SEO value. Having recently gone through the painstaking process of choosing a new Content Management System to maximise SEO value, I thought I would share some of our insights.

These are the questions that we asked in the process of choosing a suitable platform and highlight the key issues to consider;

1) Firstly decide if you need a Content Management System at all? If you are a website owner who does not need (or wish) to update their content regularly then a static HTML may well be perfectly adequate for your needs

2) Consult your digital pals and spend time reading useful resources and forums like the e-consultancy Forum Boards. The 2 platforms which we shortlisted and were continually recommended and met our SEO requirements were both open source CMS: Joomla and Drupal. In the end we chose Drupal for its overall editorial control but ultimately this will come down to your choice.

3) Control over customised Title Tags

A search-engine friendly CMS must allow for title tags to be customised, this is critical. Title Tags for Drupal currently use whatever name you use for a page title. So if you name a page "Choosing a CMS to maximise SEO" that's going to show in your title tag as well as in an H1 header tag . Some web manager may not want this duplication or want a 100% custom Title tag so they will either have to code that themselves or find a module to do it.

4) Allows for tailored static URLS creation
URLs - If you use the alias module this allows you to create any url you want. You can create URLs off directories that don't exist.

If you wanted you could create http://www.example.com/seo-guides/cms/choosing-a-cms-to-maximise-seo if you use a breadcrumbs module it's going to automatically create a breadcrumb with seo-guides and cms as parts of the path. There is a work around that will make these links either non-links or make them javascript(void) type links so they don't actually go anywhere when clicked on

5) Meta Tag Customization

The meta description and robots tags are the two important ones . Enabling Custom HTML Tags

6) Helpful user community

Consider a supporting CMS developer  community with available modules, components and widgets, Drupal has a very helpful user community with superb detailed modules for making customisable changes, click here: http://drupal.org/forum

7) Alt Tags

Alt tags are a priority from an SEO perspective, serving as the "anchor text" when an image links and providing relevant, indexable content for the search engines. Images in a CMS navigational elements should preferably use CSS-Image Replacement rather than mere alt tags, though the difference in our testing has been fairly small.

8) 301 redirect functionality;

It is important for your CMS to allow 301 redirection for expired content. On Drupal the redirect module handles many of the 301issues

9) Controlling anchor text for Internal Anchor Text Flexibility

In order to be "optimized" rather than simply search-friendly, customizing the anchor text on internal links is critical. Rather than simply making all links in a site's architecture the page's title, a great CMS should be flexible enough to handle custom input from the admins as to the anchor text of category-level or global navigation links.

10) Built in flexible user system

Allows for built-in flexible membership system

I hope you found this useful, comments are welcomed below