If you are considering building a website, or updating your existing website, one of the first things to consider is the content management system or CMS. The CMS is what you’ll be using to add content, update your blog, add images, and do your SEO. It should make sense, have built in controls that allow you to determine how your content is displayed, and offer the capabilities that your business needs, whether an RSS feed for your blog or a shopping cart for your e-commerce items.
What makes a good CMS for SEO?
One of the most important factors that decides how well a website has been SEO optimized is it’s technical performance. This is directly impacted by its on page HTML and ability to be efficiently crawled. This includes implementing readable URLs, Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Alt Tags, and optimized headings.
Here are some of the most popular content management systems right now, and how they measure up for ease of use and SEO compatibility.
WordPress has become increasingly popular in the past 5 years, and it is everywhere. Originally introduced as a free and open source blogging platform, WordPress opened itself up with innovative widgets to be one of the most popular website platforms with thousands of customizable themes, plugins, and tools that allow you to do nearly everything you could possibly want. Arguably the most SEO-friendly platform – the construction of a WordPress site is clean – you won’t run into page duplication errors and URL anomalies like you might with another CMS that is improperly set up.
If you want the ability to update your website from your mobile device or tablet, WordPress offers several native applications that allow you to update your blog or content page on the fly, if necessary.
One of the downsides to WordPress is that it is not inherently designed for ecommerce, however, there are several ecommerce and shopping cart plugins that allow this capability to be adopted – these work best with small e-commerce stores.
Joomla is a free, open source solution that is a very close second in popularity to WordPress. Boasting over 50 million downloads to date, it has a robust developer community and is a good option for consumers and small-to-medium sized e-commerce businesses. There are some drawbacks however, as it is not incredibly intuitive to use, and does require SEO extensions in order to truly be search-engine friendly. We recommend installing sh404SEF to get some necessary SEO configuration power – this plugin allows you to make your URLs search engine friendly, provides one spot to update your page title and meta information, and allows you to easily set up 301 redirects if necessary. You can read more here about the settings that should be updated before setting your new Joomla site live in order to strengthen it’s SEO power.
Drupal is one of the older CMS platforms out there. It is a tremendously powerful open-source system that was designed to be SEO friendly. Drupal is best for large scale enterprises – it can effortlessly handle hundreds of thousands of pages, and thousands of users simultaneously. It is a complicated system, however, and should really be left up to the able hands of a developer to build, update, and modify. There are no themes or free plugins, so you will need a design team and developer to build a good user friendly site.
Magento is a popular open-source ecommerce solution that is now owned by eBay. Like WordPress, there are many themes available to choose from (including many great responsive themes). Magento implements “modules” which offer inherently similar usability features to WordPress plugins in that the user is to access a library of plugins. Since Magento is open-source – many different developers have access to the code and can build and improve upon plugins.
Upon installation, Magento is NOT inherently SEO-friendly. It is necessary to comb through the settings and make sure that various settings that relate to managing URL rewrites, setting product meta tags, and product propagation are appropriately designated, or you will run into trouble down the road. There are many resources online that offer SEO best practice tips for Magento, including on Magento’s own support site, as well as from Yoast.
Known for its user friendliness and ease of use, Shopify initially debuted as an online store CMS.
However, to use Shopify to its full potential you must be able to code in Liquid, Shopify’s coding language. Shopify is fast for a hosted solution and only accepts themes with responsive layouts. Of course, it allows you to add meta descriptions, ALT tags, customizable URLs, and headers 1 – 6. One slight issue to be aware of is the URL needs to be delineated as a collections, products, pages, or blogs page which can have some negative SEO results but nothing too major. All in all, Shopify is very good and has relative ease of use but leave something to be desired.
John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, a top digital marketing agency and a six-time Inc. 5000 company. Lincoln is a frequent speaker, author of Digital Influencer, The Forecaster Method, Advolution, and creator of SEO: The Movie and Social Media Marketing: The Movie. He is consistently named one of the top digital marketers in the industry and has received the Search Engine Land "Search Marketer of the Year" award. Lincoln has taught digital marketing and web analytics at the University of California, San Diego since 2010 and has been named as one of San Diego's most admired CEOs and a top business leader under forty.
