How a CMS Can Help Your SEO Efforts

by Dave Ross

Published on June 16, 2011

In this article, you'll learn...

Why simply using a CMS isn't going to produce SEO results
How to use a CMS to simplify SEO efforts and track results more accurately

A content management system (CMS) is not a search engine optimization (SEO) magic bullet, but it can make the SEO job less painful by standardizing format and structure; adhering to best-practices; making it easy to promote internal links; and ensuring easy, flexible integration with analytics tools.

Let's take a closer look.

Is Having a CMS Enough?

Lots of basic SEO checklists start out with the same list of to-dos: use descriptive title tags, use header tags (h1, h2, and so forth), and use a CMS. Some of those lists make it seem as though building your site in a CMS is enough, that Google will magically rank you higher if it detects your site is running Drupal or any of the many tools that have emerged for building content-rich websites.

Of course, we know that's not the case. Landing pages made of handcrafted HTML regularly rank high in search engines, and I recently encountered a site built in WordPress that fell to the fourth page of results for the company's own name!

Obviously, a CMS is not a silver bullet. But content management can work in concert with content creators to make sites that are attractive to not only people but also Google.

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Dave Ross is lead developer at Straight North, an online B2B marketing agency in Chicago. Follow Straight North on Twitter: @straightnorth and on Facebook.

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Comments

by Caroline Thu Jun 16, 2011 via web
Great topic and one that does not show up very often in the blizzard of marketing advice columns. CMS can help SEO only if the content manager is willing to think like a machine as well as a human. CMS prompts for keywords, descriptions, tags and titles, but what those words are still have to come from the content manager and relate to the optimized keywords for the site. Mastering this Janus-like approach will make SEO successful whether content managed or not.
by David Gerecht Sun Jul 10, 2011 via web
I inherited the beautiful CMS that is MicroSoft SharePoint. Do you have any tips for using this leviathan for over 50 sites that need to be optimised for SEO?
by Derek Gilmore Sun Nov 20, 2011 via web
Great post. A CMS is a must have for maximizing organic SEO. If you have a site with more than 100 pages I would recommend Drupal over Wordpress as the CMS of choice. Assuming you want to go down the open source route. Drupal has better content management features and it's a true CMS from the ground up. Also the guys over at Hubspot have some great posts and data on the volume of content required to generate SEO traffic to your site. The short story is the more content the better. According to their data, once you get over 70 pages you'll start to see a real pickup in organic SEO traffic.

Derek

DMZ Interactive