Content Management Systems (CMS) for SEO
- 29th Oct 2007
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- CMS
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
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Wordpress? :)
Seconded ^^
goomla.com, with some minor SEO changes made myself.
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.
vignette :)
Hello,
Well I’m kinda hoping that wordpress is the way forward!
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)
Where’s all the Joomla! Post Nuke fans?
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.
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.
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).
TYPO3 gets my vote, i’ve used many others. Wordpress out the box is actually pretty bad at seo.
Check out ModXCMS.com
Add in the SEO Strict URLs plugin and it has zero duplicate url/content issues out of the box.
Modxcms is also my cms of choice.
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.
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/
ModX is my choice, highly recommended. Not many mods but very easy to develop whatever you need. SEO out of the box.
Textpattern works great, a little more “site” related than wordpress which is more blog focused.
Anyone have any luck using Microsoft Sharepoint as a CMS with SEO?
Definitely Wordpress. I used also drupal but wordpress is really simple and you can do almost all you want with it. HTH.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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!
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.
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
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
*** Joomla will do your head in. ***
Amen, Brother.
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/.
*** 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I forgot to mention sNews from h**p://www.solucija.com/home/snews/. Extremely lightweight and easy to customize.
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
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.
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,
Anyone here got (good/bad?) experiences with cmsmadesimple regarding seo? -> http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
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.
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.
[…] Dave Nailor tette fel az olvasóinak a kérdést, hogy milyen keresőbarát, keresőoptimalizálás szempontjából jónak tekinthető CMS-eket ismernek. Gondoltam érdemes összesíteni a hozzászólások eredményeit. […]
I have used wordpress, movabletype and ModX for some ogf my sites. I like wp and mt best any way.
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 ;)
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.
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 :(
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.
http://www.jojocms.org
textpattern - it rocks
definitelly wordpress. easy to handle many blog with desktop blogging software. so damn logins just blog all day long :)
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
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/
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/
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!
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
What about SEO impact?
I use Joomla! which won Open Source CMS Award 2007. It’s very SEO oriented and simple to use.
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 ;)
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.
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.
New release for Joomla! 1.5, great!
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.
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.