Even though a CMS (content management system) is an entirely different thing from SEO (search engine optimization), they are often used together for a common goal.
King Of CMS
WordPress is the king of CMS making it possible for anyone to put their thoughts onto the internet and do it fast and efficiently compared to hacking out HTML pages and trying to link them all together. You may think there would be no reason to go farther like custom CMS, but many times WordPress turns out to be too broad in its design; sort of a jack of all trades but a master of none. There are some really nice advantages to WordPress mainly plugins like the WordPress SEO Plugin by Joost de Valk that helps any writer optimize the content for better performance in the search engine results pages.
Custom Content Management System Advantages
Custom CMS can give you greatly improved performance in both speed and optimization. It can be designed with your specific needs in mind making the interface more like a fill in the blank experience than something with a million different possibilities of which any one of them could cause more harm than they are worth having in the first place. By streamlining the CMS you can greatly reducing the time needed to do these more specif tasks. An example could be dropping a photo into place and writing a brief description, you don’t have to tell WordPress that you want a photo there and where and how it is to be
positioned. Another issue I have encountered is getting WordPress to anything much faster than a crawl for page speed even with caching systems in place. Page speed is an important factor when the search engines debate your position in the the search results. Getting WordPress to “crawl” much faster than 2 seconds is a real chore , but some of my custom CMS can render a page in less that a half second.
CMS – SEO Point of View
SEO is a wide subject covering hundreds of different topics but when it comes to the CMS that is powering the Website, it is important the the CMS is writing correctly the following:
URLs – Like “http://www.yourwebsitename.com/buy-my-products-here/” NOT “http://www.yourwebsitename.com/p=189/”!!! URLs help search engines determine what the page is about.
Title Tags – The text that shoes in the tab at the top of the browser and in search results. Again, search engines use title tags to help determine what the page is about and what to put in the snippet in the search results.
Page Headings – The biggest bold text on page that describes what the page is about. Yet again, search engines use headings to help determine what the page is about.
Internal links – To other pages. Search engines follow links within a Website to discover new content and to help establish what pages get more credit as far as positioning in search results go. Guess what, they also use the anchor text of the link to determine what the page the link points to is about also!
External links to other Websites. These are used once again to determine what the page is about at the destination of the bound link. Also how relevant the two sites are to each other, and a few other lesser factors.
Sitemap – Important for search engines to find the the pages on a Website in the first place.
If any of these things (and many more) are not being performed correctly, your CMS is likely causing harm to your Website’s positioning in the SERPs.
