Content Management Systems & SEO

Top (well it was Top Ten but it's rather more now...) things you don't want to see in your CMS;

1. The content that you can manage is the on-page text and that's it. The code itself, the code you need to optimise to make the site engine-friendly, you can't get near it. This means;

2. You can't alter or implement title tags. The problem with this is that without individual title tags, Google may well not be able to determine that your page is a page. It won't ever get in the index. To Google, it looks like odd clusters of code are linked to other misshapen bunches of code. Clearly designated pages, with title tags, header tags, paragraph structures etc., Google will index. Eventually. But not what appear to be nearly random code groupings.

3. You can't alter or implement header tags. Google will expect an H1 header tag to be the big chief of any particular page. It doesn't help a site to improve in the ranks for, say, Widgets'R'Us, when un-removable H1 header tags are wrapped around text such as "click here", thus informing the engines that this is a page dedicated to the virtues of "click here".

4. You can't alter internal/external links. You may, for instance, want to turn them into rel="nofollow" links, indicating to Google that no link benefit should be transferred through the link. This hoards your Page Rank, for those who are concerned about these things. Also, you may want to edit the anchor text, which can greatly affect the ranking of both the origin page and the destination page. Similarly, you may wish to amend a text link to include rel="nofollow" so you can affect the internal distribution of Page Rank within the site for SEO purposes.

5. You can't alter any existing or implement alt text. You may wish to, especially if the graphic involved is a link or can be made into one. Again, if done correctly this will positively affect the rankings of both the originating page and the destination page.

6. You can't replace basic text links, say to "Home", with a graphic link you can put alt text in. Linking to "Home" tells us about as much about the originating and destination pages as "Click here" does. Often substituting the text link with an appropriate graphic link saying Home gives you the opportunity to tell the engines what kind of page is being linked to through use again of the alt text. Alt text that says "search engine optimisation home page" tells an engine a whole lot more than simple "home" ever can.

7. Urls are formed with whole words joined together (joinedtogether), or joined by underscores (joined_by_underscores). There's no facility for joining them with hyphens (joining-them-with-hyphens), which is a great help if it can be done. Searchengineoptimisation and contentmanagementsystems and search_engine_optimisation and content_management_systems are nonsense words to the engines. They bear no relation to nor have any association with search engine optimisation and content management systems.(Google are talking about implementing this though - we'll have to wait and see what happens...

8. Links to the CMS developer's site on every page. Ironically, this hurts them more than it hurts you. It looks so much like paid links that they'll be far more likely to get penalised for obvious attempts to game Google's results (for so it will appear) than you will for leaking Page Rank. You could still do without it though, particularly as the likelihood is that your site will have nothing to do with web development in any way. Who you choose to link to tells the engines a lot about you. It's a decision that shouldn't be forced on you by anybody, let alone your CMS developers.

9. Invisible links to the CMS developer's site on every page. Even worse. Invisible text, hidden from plain view by trickery with the code but plainly visible to the engines, is like holding up a red flag. Tricks like this have been used in times past to hide multiple insertions of keywords into pages by spammers. Your developers may well see absolutely no harm in this. That's why they're developers, not SEOs. Being as it's an old trick, the engines are wise to it. They are likely to punish any instances of it by penalties. Well, not so much penalties, more a site will not be advanced as far as it otherwise might have been. We come back to that word provenance again. Provenance unblemished, that's what the engines want to see.

10. The developers say "Our SEO team can do any SEO work you need!". This means though you're limited to using whoever they happen to be employing at any time and at any place. Any track record they speak of could have been created by the team who left en masse the week before to start their own SEO business. Fair's fair, the in-house optimisers might be entirely competent. The point is, whether they are or not, you're denying yourself the choice of going elsewhere should you feel the need to. If after six months or a year you aren't happy with their efforts, you're stuck with them as, trust me on this, no CMS developer will let anyone else near the code used to create it. By the time you find out you've been sold a pup, you've exhausted your finances. This won't worry the developers - naive clients are like buses, there'll be another one along in a minute - but even the remote prospect of it ought to be worrying you if you're one of the clients in question.

11. The developers assure you that "You can alter the meta tags". Good grief - they might as well be offering you a free car-phone with every sale, they couldn't be more ignorant. The keywords tag is largely, many would say completely redundant, I prefer to use it in case it comes back into use, however, while the meta description tag presents an excellent opportunity to mount a brief sales pitch, but will contribute nothing at all to your potential rankings. It is worth doing, but only because it's often used for the brief snippet of information about the page the engines will display in the search results.

12. No ftp access means you can't make your own Google/Yahoo/Ask & MSN XML protocol sitemaps and that is a bad, bad thing. Sitemaps are lately becoming more important, yielding research and metrics information possibly critical to the success or failure of your site. No ftp access can mean every time you add a page you have to pay the developers whatever they want before they'll upload the sitemap for you, since you'll not be able to do it for yourself. Either you pay as you go every time or you pay a standing fee - either way, this seems a lot to be paying for a service that wouldn't be necessary if you'd had the site built properly in the first place.

13. The guy who built the CMS you use is now too expensive/too busy/works for Google and doesn't talk to the likes of you any more/has been taken by aliens. Or, I suppose, all of the above - either way, you can't get hold of him any more and that annoying problem that you'd always meant to ask him about has got worse to the point where it's threatening the stability of the whole of the site - that would be the site that pays your mortgage - so now you have to pay someone you never had any personal dealings with before to go in and fix it. Or, maybe one or two people have to go in and have a look at it for whatever reason. Where does this leave you when it all goes pear-shaped and they start blaming each other and/or the original developer? It leaves you not knowing whom you should be blaming and I would suggest just the one candidate here; yourself for getting into this mess in the first place. Getting your friend's girlfriend's younger cousin who's at Uni and will work for peanuts to design your CMS might seem like a good deal at the time but years later, with the site in the full bloom of money-making maturity, a potentially serious problem crops up that needs the developer's attention and you find to your horror that you can't get hold of him... who, then, do you turn to? The only way to save yourself from this predicament is to never get into it in the first place. If you absolutely must ignore my advice and use a CMS, then use one from the mainstream, one that's likely to have quality support available for all the years ahead that you'll be likely to be using it.

CMS clients - the problems they'll face.

For clients, it's very much a case of caveat emptor. If you want a web site built that will properly service your needs rather than those of the site developers then there really aren't any short cuts. If you're going to learn how to use a CMS then you might as well - and you'd certainly be better off - spend your time learning basic html, or maybe Drupal, so my techie chums tell me, and build at least the basis of the site yourself. You can leave the design of any specific bells and whistles you have in mind to the specialists, recruiting them as you go if need be.

Finding a site in this sorry situation denies me personally the opportunity to make the best of my abilities as my best optimisation plans are usually conceived and developed while I'm rummaging around in the code. Effectively it cripples my ability to best serve my client - and make money for myself too.

In being so inflexible, CMS developers are denying their clients the opportunity to maximise their commercial investment. I know many CMS developers will angrily deny this and refer to statements from entirely reputable SEOs about the overwhelming importance of InBound Links to optimisation. They will suggest therefore that on-page optimisation is by comparison so unimportant it may safely be ignored. IBLs are a indeed a very powerful aid to high rankings but they aren't by any means the whole story. On-page optimisation is an essential of any serious commercial optimisation campaign.

CMS developers - irresponsibility writ large but profitable.

I think myself many of the companies offering products such as these that are arguably unfit for purpose given an obvious need for flexibility due to the commercial nature of such projects, simply shouldn't be in business. The products they offer inhibit the ability of any purchaser to maximise the potential of their investment; if they can't have on-page optimisation properly performed, then they can't make as much money from the venture as they otherwise might. Do clients realise this when they buy? One imagines not. Do the developers realise when they're developing? Well, I rather gather that some do and some don't. Either way, in my experience, they don't seem inclined to put in the time and effort necessary to address the problem. Problems that in conscience shouldn't be there in the first place.

You might wonder how any of these products can be sold, and can still continue to be sold. They don't seem to be illegal, they are what they say they are, content management systems, and they do indeed allow someone with no html knowledge to manage the content of their web site. The fact they don't allow optimisation of that content so it may be bought to the attention of the search engines simply doesn't seem to be a factor that's considered, often by either by the buyer or the seller. This illustrates very well the lamentable lack of education the public has in general regarding SEO.