So you have decided to facilitate content creation?
But which content management system to use? The options available from open source and free software is vast. With today’s websites moving over to CMS so that client’s can control the publishing and flow of their information resources and implement accessibility at the same time, which CMS system should we in the SEO community promote?
The system should offer adequate site structure and unique titles with the clear URL generation and valid HTML, how about ALT text for images too?
Are the commercial CMS products out there better than the freebies?
Dan Horton SEO
80 Comments
-
1
29th October 2007 @ 13:57
-
2
Seconded ^^
29th October 2007 @ 14:31
-
3
goomla.com, with some minor SEO changes made myself.
29th October 2007 @ 14:43
-
4
Yeah so far Wordpress is the best CMS system I have used.
But the only one I tried before WP is Mambo, wich was a little bit over complicated for me.29th October 2007 @ 14:48
-
5
vignette
29th October 2007 @ 15:28
-
6
Hello,
Well I’m kinda hoping that wordpress is the way forward!
29th October 2007 @ 15:35
-
7
I experienced good results with redaxo. I don’t know if there is an english website available, though.
http://www.redaxo.de/
For blogs I still use wordpress, but for “sites” redaxo was way better suited. (media manager for example, organization of static content)29th October 2007 @ 15:46
-
8
Where’s all the Joomla! Post Nuke fans?
29th October 2007 @ 15:48
-
9
Hey Dan,
We’ve used Mambo & Joomla and found them to be pretty decent. One client is interested in Serena, and we’re looking into it for them now as well.
29th October 2007 @ 15:55
-
10
I was partial to modxcms.com for quite some time, but ran into problems with hosting requirements and decided to go with Wordpress + the development speed of modxcms is not quite up to par with the thousands of WP-developers out there.
29th October 2007 @ 15:56
-
11
depends on what objectives of the site are, although i do believe the powers of vbulletin are vastly underestimated (it’s more than just a message board).
29th October 2007 @ 16:01
-
12
TYPO3 gets my vote, i’ve used many others. Wordpress out the box is actually pretty bad at seo.
29th October 2007 @ 16:19
-
13
Check out ModXCMS.com
Add in the SEO Strict URLs plugin and it has zero duplicate url/content issues out of the box.
29th October 2007 @ 16:41
-
14
Modxcms is also my cms of choice.
29th October 2007 @ 17:27
-
15
Drupal! it’s the best out there, and offers tons of features through 3rd party modules that makes it very easy to deploy an seo minded site.
29th October 2007 @ 18:20
-
16
Anyone ever tried Ektron? It’s not open source nor is it cheap but it’s powerful and extensive in terms of content management. In terms of SEO, it can be optimized programmatically (i.e. dynamic titles, alt attributes, etc.). I know it’s used for a lot of large scale jobs so for simple sites it may be too much.
I also love WordPress. Works like a charm and no worries about all that licensing garbage. WordPress CAN be optimized with a little work. Most WP platform users know the pitfalls but there are pre-”SEO’d” themes available foir those who don’t. Most of the time, my vote is for WP.
If anyone is interested, I’ve setup a demo for most of the CMSs available in Fantastico: h**p://adammoro.net/labs/cms-demos/
29th October 2007 @ 18:32
-
17
ModX is my choice, highly recommended. Not many mods but very easy to develop whatever you need. SEO out of the box.
29th October 2007 @ 22:42
-
18
Textpattern works great, a little more “site” related than wordpress which is more blog focused.
29th October 2007 @ 22:44
-
19
Anyone have any luck using Microsoft Sharepoint as a CMS with SEO?
29th October 2007 @ 23:29
-
20
Definitely Wordpress. I used also drupal but wordpress is really simple and you can do almost all you want with it. HTH.
29th October 2007 @ 23:35
-
21
ALL of the free and ALL of the commercial CMS products out there suffer some appalling Duplicate Content issues.
The first one to actually get it right would find that sites using it would have an instant advantage over everyone else. Someone step forward and make it happen!As for using Joomla; I’ve seen the results of a bad implementation of that. It ain’t pretty.
Wordpress, with a lot of work, is manageable, but still not absolutely ideal.29th October 2007 @ 23:39
-
22
ModX
Drupal is a nightmare for anything below the 1st-level directory in terms of URLs. Duplicate content issues all over the place, plus, there is a flaw with its URL-building that allows anyone to construct - theoretically - as many URL variations as they like, to point to the same page.
Drupal, however, is (or could be) a wicked system but it’s become an unwieldly monster trying to gallop ahead at too fast a pace… I’m gonna stop now ‘cos this could turn into a long one
30th October 2007 @ 00:31
-
23
I use wordpress first for seo clients, and Joomla for larger sites where content management is the priority rather than the promotion of it.
To get the most out of Joomla though, YOU NEED FULL ACCESS TO YOUR .HTACCESS FILE for mod rewrite etc.
Both I find are very good for SEO purposes, if you’ve a clue what your doing.
I’ve used Drupal and got decent results too.
Some comments here about dup content issues, yeah, got whalloped with some dup issues with all of the CMS at one time or another.
If you know your way round a robots.txt problems seem to diminish.
30th October 2007 @ 01:44
-
24
I was always a fan of custom software, I had wordpress setup in a directory on one domain and I could never get the content pages from wordpress to rank as well as the custom pages. I almost gave up on wordpress as a bad joke. After I made some template changes and did some SEO work to my wordpress test mules things got much better. I’ve sworn off custom software, it’s far too expensive and developers are more often than not unreliable. I’m running some trials now with the various CMS / O/S stuff to see what else is good!
30th October 2007 @ 08:09
-
25
I’d chime in and go for WP too, but I’m currently extending it to make my own atm, which will then get my vote.
30th October 2007 @ 10:13
-
26
Hi from Sydney
Love Wordpress for Blogs or small Business Sites. You need to add the SEO plug ins and play with the URL %formats% to get the best bang for buck.
For more serious CMS applications Joomla with ArtioSEF plug in, plus you need to hack the front page and content pages to make their headings actually H1, H2, etc and just because you did this on the core, doesnt mean any plugins you used will do it as well.
This is a pain but doable, though the major site I did http://www.dynamicbusiness.com still has some issues with lack of H1, h2 headings.
Nothing I have found does a good job of meta tags on Joomla. Also dont make your site title too long, it will push out the title of the content pages as well.
However if you are used to wordpress, Joomla will do your head in.
Mike
30th October 2007 @ 12:30
-
27
Hi,
I tried a little Typo3 but it was long time ago so I won’t comment on that but I do use WP frequently due to its simlpicity as most of us. I like very much Drupal (still don’t know why) by the number of queries to the db is enormous when the traffic is heavy. I’m gonna test Joomla soon and will also try MODxCMS as many of you recommend. But I think that always the best solution is … your own written CMS.
Best Regards
30th October 2007 @ 13:00
-
28
*** Joomla will do your head in. ***
Amen, Brother.
30th October 2007 @ 14:57
-
29
Hey guys,
Great (and mediocre) minds think alike. I just put up a post on my blog re SEO Friendly CMS requirements. Here’s an excerpt:
Allows the user to create category names for search engine consumption that can show up in the URL, Title Tag, Meta Descrition Tag, Meta Keywords Tag, Alt Attribute, Anchor Text, Title Attribute, etc. Examples of categories could be sections, dates, authors, etc. An example of a date category could be “November/2007”.The naming conventions need to have a consistent logical structure. For example if you have /deliverables/seo/reporting/ then you shouldn’t also have /deliverables/reporting/seo/ or /deliverables/seo/client/reporting/.
30th October 2007 @ 21:21
-
30
*** SEO Friendly CMS requirements ***
The biggest requirement is eradication of Duplicate Content issues: eliminating multiple URL paths that can access the exact same content. None of the CMS systems out there properly address that issue “right out the box”.
*** An example of a date category could be “November/2007”. The naming conventions need to have a consistent logical structure. ***
If you are using dates, then there are many obvious advantages to using Year/Month/Day ordering, with a full four-digit year and two digits for each of the month and the day.
This Big-Endian ordering naturally sorts into correct order on both a numerical and alphabetical sort. RFC 3339 also applies.
30th October 2007 @ 21:57
-
31
I think you get what you pay for, I have found what I think is a good programmer now and he can do everything I want. My new admin area is great loads of info in there.
31st October 2007 @ 00:20
-
32
Wordpress is my personal choice - simple enough to manage, inbuilt RSS and ping, and flexible enough to modify with what you need. Use it for pretty much everything these days.
31st October 2007 @ 09:45
-
33
I can’t comment on their value in terms of SEO, but pretty much every CMS mentioned above is a pig to work with, they’re bloated, complex and there are so many constraints and limitations in each system its rare I’ve used one and not had to compromise the site in some way or other. If you want a proper CMS with SEO capabilities and don’t want to compromise in any way, go bespoke - then train then end user in the basics of SEO so they don’t mess up your hard work.
31st October 2007 @ 11:59
-
34
I also wanted to add my vote for ModX. It’s also incredibly easy to design templates for it, and it keeps the code much cleaner than other CMS systems I’ve tried.
31st October 2007 @ 15:52
-
35
I forgot to mention sNews from h**p://www.solucija.com/home/snews/. Extremely lightweight and easy to customize.
31st October 2007 @ 19:08
-
36
Hey all…
Drupal has a great taxonomy module. I would stay away from Joomla. About once a week or more a major security vulnerability shows up with Joomla.
C
31st October 2007 @ 21:09
-
37
Definitely Drupal. Very good CMS, and very SEO friendly with a few supplemental modules. It’s very good when it comes to heavy traffic, offers multi-site installation out of the box (a lot better than WP-MU). The code is clean and well documented, and well structured. It’s very flexible, allowing you to do nearly anything you want. I love the ability to create custom installs, which really speed up the process when it’s about website mass-creation.
31st October 2007 @ 22:00
-
38
Definitly i wouldnt change any html template to CMS , unless you are php developer or asp it is very hard to make major changes in website structure with big costs. or not to mention all the static adresses which may not be avilable with the new cms,
1st November 2007 @ 00:33
-
39
Anyone here got (good/bad?) experiences with cmsmadesimple regarding seo? -> http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
1st November 2007 @ 10:18
-
40
I go for Drupal which makes it very easy to create a well optimized site. But no CMS will take the burden away from you to create good content.
1st November 2007 @ 10:47
-
41
I’ve started looking at CMS made simple but have not taken it any further than that. I think it looks good on the surface but I can’t see any reason to move away from wordpress to be honest. Interesting comments about Drupal, I’ve been testing wordpress MU with good results so far. It was a long way from being easy to setup because it’s designed to run in the root, once it’s running it’s as easy to manage multiple blog installs. So far.
1st November 2007 @ 11:54
-
42
[...] Dave Nailor tette fel az olvasóinak a kérdést, hogy milyen keresőbarát, keresőoptimalizálás szempontjából jónak tekinthető CMS-eket ismernek. Gondoltam érdemes összesíteni a hozzászólások eredményeit. [...]
1st November 2007 @ 13:18
-
43
I have used wordpress, movabletype and ModX for some ogf my sites. I like wp and mt best any way.
1st November 2007 @ 15:46
-
44
I Think Typo3 is the best CMS for SEO - you can create valid Pages with any sourcecode / tags / url´s you like.. It takes some time 2 firure out how everything works - but the strong comunitiy and tons of extentions will help you — sorry 4 my bad english
1st November 2007 @ 19:18
-
45
Wow … never thought I’d have to wait until #42 to hear some support for Movable Type. I’ve had good success with it, and have ported all my WP sites to MT.
1st November 2007 @ 19:28
-
46
Wordpress’s biggest advantage is the large number of developers and users - security problems are spotted quickly and fixed quickly.
SEO out of the box is moderately sucky and the majority of themes need major patching before they are ready for real use
1st November 2007 @ 23:39
-
47
JoJo is a neat little CMS with SEO in mind, clean code, css and some seo features. There not a massive comminuty behind it so not many plug ins compared to joomla / wordpress but what has been developed so far looks good.
2nd November 2007 @ 00:15
-
48
textpattern - it rocks
2nd November 2007 @ 06:21
-
49
definitelly wordpress. easy to handle many blog with desktop blogging software. so damn logins just blog all day long
2nd November 2007 @ 14:20
-
50
I’m a big fan of WordPress, especially since v3.2.1 it does proper 301 redirects (www- or non-www, with trailing-/ or without etc), and with the seo pack plugin it’s really good now.
And there’s also Drupal which seems alright
2nd November 2007 @ 23:26
-
51
Has anyone else here tried ArticleLive? Its very SEO and I find it handy to use for a wide range of different sites I produce. Have a look if you guys are interested: http://www.interspire.com/articlelive/
4th November 2007 @ 01:12
-
52
I guess wordpress if you’re looking for a free tool. If you’re prepared to go the commercial route, I’d say ArticleLive. Has anyone else here used it? I find it useful for using for a wide range site types that I make. It also handles SEO rather nicely. If anyones interested, take a peak: http://www.interspire.com/articlelive/
4th November 2007 @ 01:15
-
53
Oops, only just noticed my double post, feel free to delete one. I thought I accidentally refreshed the page before posting, but it appears I must have submitted the form. My bad!
4th November 2007 @ 02:22
-
54
I have a question; talking about content management systems.
Does anyone know of a good open source or paid for Client Management System
similar to cms except I want to manage all my clients SEO work from a central DB.
e.g I run a report and upload it to my ClientMS, my client is able to login and view that report etc.
6th November 2007 @ 15:14
-
55
I am using Joomla and so far its doing the job. Although the modules and components in market are not the best, they are expensive and make your site more slow!
6th November 2007 @ 16:52
-
56
As a seo I have to say that the easiest way to find satisfying CMS is to build it yourself. As an alternative you can use joomla, but to have it working in search engine friendly environment will take you months of adjustments.
7th November 2007 @ 04:34
-
57
My vote is for drupal for small to large business. I’m also a little concerned to read what people have been saying about my beloved cms. With a few tweaks of the .htaccess file and a number of free modules such as clean urls and url alias with a little more tweaking of robots.txt you have no duplicate content issues and a great site for SEO and delivering content to the users.
With this CMS and obviously other work, I’ve taken a number of sites from new 3 months ago to page 1/2 for our targetted keywords, our newer keyword phrases are still back on page 4-6 but moving up.
If you’re looking for simply a blog, I would go the way of Wordpress, though is that really a CMS?
8th November 2007 @ 20:10
-
58
i use BP Blog (free and ASP) which with some mods if powerful… the author is also doing a CMS of a sorts based on pages which looks promising.
9th November 2007 @ 12:40
-
59
What about SEO impact?
12th November 2007 @ 22:15
-
60
I use Joomla! which won Open Source CMS Award 2007. It’s very SEO oriented and simple to use.
22nd November 2007 @ 10:28
-
61
Drupal is great for SEO. There are some duplicate content issues, but they’re easily fixed. In fact, I wrote an article about it. Google for “Drupal SEO”, you’ll see it
27th November 2007 @ 20:30
-
62
The problem with content management systems is that they frequently clash with good design and development workflows. For instance, typically a CMS will use a templating system that redirects the template from a directory that is not at the root. If you use Dreamweaver templating or any other sort of templating during development this gets very frustrating as it will break the relative linking of everything. I recently had this problem with wordpress and we ended up rewriting some of the back-end code of workpress so it find the template at the root directory, hence it doesn’t break the relative linking for stylesheets etc. Otherwise you will need to have seperate templates for your static pages and your blog, which could get very annoying.
We have also used MODX and Joomla. I’m quite fond of Joomla as it makes extensibility (writing modules etc.) easier, but this was after extensive modification to make it search engine friendly. ModX was the most search engine friendly product out of the box. Wordpress had similar problems to Joomla in terms of needing to be modified.
23rd January 2008 @ 02:26
-
63
I vote for modxcms. Though it doesn’t automatically provide ALT tags for images but I guess there is no software/cms which provides the same.
29th January 2008 @ 17:59
-
64
New release for Joomla! 1.5, great!
1st February 2008 @ 10:12
-
65
Wordpress is by far the most flexible platform for CMS. Its ease of use for content management makes this my choice for all client projects.
Also the wordpress community is huge so support is second to none with frequent plugins available.
13th April 2008 @ 23:25
-
66
We developed Jojo CMS to be devoid of dupe content problems, because as mentioned most CMS’s get this wrong.
Each page has code that compares the actual URL with the correct URL and does a 301 if they don’t match. Fixes all problems relating to PHPSESSID, users renaming pages, pagination issues around page1, www vs non-www, random querystring variables etc.
This works great, but you need to be careful with Adwords and things that add tracking data to the querystring that you don’t want redirected.
Our community is just getting started, but we feel that our out-of-box SEO is up there with the best.
15th April 2008 @ 01:42
-
67
Are we talking about blog’s or full featured CMS’s? If’s it’s a blog, for me their is no question - Wordpress.
If your looking for a full featured CMS, I am pretty fond of Drupal.
Granted it is not super friendly to the search engines in a standard config. But once you get the URL structure set up & make it so it doesn’t’ produce duplicate content galore, etc. Your sitting on a pretty tight FREE CMS.
15th June 2008 @ 20:56
-
68
Hello
Am doing an SEO contract for a company and tehy are currently using Teamsite as a CMS system. Has anyone had any experiences (good or bad) using it for SEO? Also any tips are welcome!
Cheers
D25th June 2008 @ 11:51
-
69
I am curious if any of the previous 68 coomenters have built and e-business site. I have a custom and outdated CMS and shopping cart and am looking to upgrade to something more standard and full featured.
Shopping carts integrate CMS and do an absolute horrible job of it. After much research, I think I have locked in on C-Cart.
10th August 2008 @ 15:47
-
70
I have been searching a long time for a CMS that has the right SEO qualities. Ive tested Joomla, wordpress, Drupal and MODx. So I guess the holy grail is still out there. I found out that which ever CMS you choose you need to alter and tailer the CMS for SEO. Drupal is the most complex and badly documented. Joomla is the most cluttered in the html code and wordpress is the lightest nut tailored towards blogs. So for my Adsense site at http://www.shortcututopia.com I am testing modx and wordpress. I will hopefully let you all know how everything works out.
31st August 2008 @ 21:38
-
71
The problems with out of the box CMS systems and SEO is that there are no standards of SEO. Many practices are common but many users, designers and SEO implementers will have their own individual needs for the project.
With that, it only makes sense that in every case, for every person they will need to customize their CMS to suit. The trick is to find the CMS that doesn’t create barriers or worse make it impossible to achieve your desired setup. So the perfect Free Open Source CMS is the one that has the least amount of effort to achieve your goal.
BTW: I’m on the modx CMS team (Marketing) and if you have any suggestions or links for SEO best practices, please share.
1st September 2008 @ 15:01
-
72
Hey. I’m sorry for offtopic. Where you download this theme for site? I realy love it.
Amalia19th September 2008 @ 02:34
-
73
[...] they are certainly worth investigating. Dave Naylor’s blog has a great discussion going on search engine friendly content management systems. Spend your time and treasure on something more interesting. If you are still bent on taking this [...]
14th November 2008 @ 19:06
-
74
Ektron is a great CMS for SEO; multilayer image tags, dynamic, etc. It’s really not that expensive either - (although no comparison to wordpress) but I’ve had some great SEO results with Ektron. Big sites will be well served by Ektron’s SEO friendly controls.
31st December 2008 @ 01:44
-
75
Pixelsilk (http://www.pixelsilk.com)
I wouldn’t normally make a shameless plug blog entry, but the question was asked.
Wordpress does make a decent CMS for the right client (usually very light CMS requirements), but as businesses get more serious about content management Wordpress becomes less of an option.
For many CMS systems, SEO was an afterthought and though there are some decent plug-ins to many of the popular CMSs, Pixelsilk (http://www.pixelsilk.com) is a content management system that was built from the ground up by SEOs for SEOs. We debuted at SMX West just 10 days ago and had great reception.
Some notable features:
1. Fulll HTML control.
2. Full URL Control.
3. Pixelsilk Search Advice system allows for SEOs to deliver branded, page specific advice to the person editing the page, while they are editing the page.
4. Extensible via APIsPlease feel free to check out the website and request a demo.
19th February 2009 @ 17:28
-
76
It’s CMSMS (CMS Made Simple) all the way for me. It’s really easy to make SEO friendly sites in it since you’ve got full control over the site in a simple way. All templates are edited right in the system and just about everything can be coded to your own liking. It’s also stable and fast.
7th April 2009 @ 20:30
-
77
Its not easy to simply choose one as a universal best as everyone has a different need. But wordpress and Drupal should do for most as they do well in search engines as well.
23rd April 2009 @ 17:28
-
78
I believe Joomla is best CMS for SEO
6th June 2009 @ 09:13
-
79
Without effective SEO (search engine optimization) you may as well not even be online, with the traffic that you’ll miss out on.
10th June 2009 @ 03:19
-
80
It all depends on the content of the website; that will determine what is needed to keep the content flowing on a continous basis. I know sites like http://www.vacationrentalsad.com use a very advanced OS, while the simple “blog” uses WordPress/Blogger easy scripting.
29th June 2009 @ 15:59
Copyright © 2004 - 2009 David Naylor. All rights reserved |
Wordpress?