SEO and Your CMS: Making It Work for You

Creating content is the first step; making sure you are able to consistently feed the search engine beast fresh meat, as it were, is the next. A content management system, or CMS, is an invaluable tool in helping it come – and stay – together. The problem that you may encounter, though, is that your CMS is not SEO-friendly; many platforms were just not designed for this purpose. So, because you need content that is optimised, how you can get around this hurdle?

When your CMS is not set up to handle SEO tasks, it can result in several problems, including inability to create unique and targeted title and description tags, assigning too many dynamic URLs, producing URLs with poor keywording, and publishing content that is poorly coded, which makes it invisible to search engines.

Ideally, you want a CMS that is able to handle SEO tasks, and if you look at your options, you’ll find an endless list that are “search engine friendly,” or “SEO Ready.” Are they? In a way, sure. In another, more time-consuming way, no. There are few that are ready to go out-of-the-box with full SEO functionality. But there are ways around that. WordPress, for instance, is fantastic and a top CMS choice for pros once you install all the various plugins and modules. Other top options include Shopify and the nimble Refinery.

What do you need it to do? Here’s a list of your must-have functions:

• Intuitive navigation.
• Easy and powerful links with customisable anchor text.
• Ability to maintain your Robot.txt.
• Easy editing of file and image information.
• Easily customisable page titles and descriptions for each page.
• Customisable URLs.
• Quick and easy editing of headline tags.
• Easy to set correct permalink structures to avoid duplicate content.
• Options for additional functionality via plugin.

It is important to remember that you can do SEO regardless of your CMS. Those that offer these features, however, make it much easier and faster. They can also take some tasks right off the table so you never worry about them again because they are automated. If your CMS isn’t earning its keep, considering switching to a more flexible solution.