Content Management Systems and search
engine optimization (SEO) used to be mutually exclusive terms. But the
SEO community has been driving the developers of Content Management
Systems to integrate more SEO-friendly methodology within their systems.
Content Management Systems (CMS) are a hot topic right now with many
corporate websites are turning to these systems to handle thousands of
pages of dynamic data that they need to update regularly. Content
Management Systems allow information to be added, edited or deleted
automatically over the entire website. This can save hundreds of hours
in manual updates. Pages of content are generated on the fly using a
template driven system.
When Content Management Systems were first developed, most had little
regard for the requirements of search engine optimization. For some
Content Management Systems this still holds true. Most CMS's, however,
now have workarounds to accommodate those wanting to perform search
engine optimization on their websites. The workarounds in the Content
Management Systems involve two areas: writing search engine friendly
URL's and creating individualized title and meta tags per page.
Writing Search Engine Friendly URL's
Some search engines (SE's) and directories like Google and Yahoo! can
now read dynamic URL's but there are still a fair amount which can't or
can only partially read them. The SE's like to see pages that have
unique content per page and may limit the number of variable strings
(i.e. ?, =. &) in a URL to assure unique content.
By using a web server module called Mod_Rewrite it is possible to remove
the stop characters from the URL string, thus making it more
SE-friendly. To do this you will need to add a rule to the .htaccess
file. For more information, see the following article on the Apache
website: http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
Creating Individualized Title and Meta Tags
Some Content Management Systems such the latest release from Hot Banana
Software boast full integration with SEO performance such as offering
Conversion Tracking tool, Robots.txt and Meta Tag Management. Other
CMS's such as PostNuke.com is struggling to catch up and offer
workarounds to make their system more flexible and SE-friendly.
PostNuke.com says that their next version (.8 release at this writing)
will be fully SEO compliant. Until then, they recommend the pnMeta
module, which will give control over the title, keyword and description
tags over an individual page. Dynamically generated meta tag
information, however, is not recommended. For more information see:
http://www.miragelab.com/News+article-sid-19.phtml
What Does CMS Mean For SEO's?
Search engine optimization experts and others using SEO techniques will
need to work closely with Webmasters and developers who use Content
Management Systems on their web properties. This collaborative effort is
necessary to insure that URL's are SE-friendly and that unique title and
meta tags are severed up for each optimized page. A large website with
tons of valuable content, should rank well in the search engines
according to the SE's guidelines and the CMS technology would do well
not to inhibit this, but rather would do well to promote good search
engine rankings for large websites.
Copyright © 2004 SEO
Resource
Search Engine Marketing Specialists
Kevin Kantola is the CEO of SEO
Resource, a California search engine optimization company, and has
published many articles over the past 20 years.
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/
