cms seo tips guides

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When choosing a CMS (content management system) the majority of people consider its features, interface, opportunities for customization, and little else. SEO often goes overlooked as few realize that the platform you choose will have a significant impact on your website’s optimization in the future. It’s essential that you realize how SEO features are built into some CMSs and how you can improve upon them to maximize the visibility of your website.

How CMS Affects SEO: Mechanisms of Influence

Your CMS platform affects SEO in several ways:

  1. Its built-in optimization features enable you to make the content of your website more visible to Google bots.
  2. Its ability to integrate specialized SEO plugins allows you to expand the limits set by the built-in optimization features.
  3. The functionality of the content management system determines how much you can optimize your content.

The second factor is the most important when it comes to choosing a CMS because additional plugins can make up for any system’s original limitations. Of course, you should consider the system’s built-in benefits as well so you can determine what kind of plugins you need. The good news is that systems with pre-installed SEO features are often more secure because using third-party software always compromises the integrity of the system.

You’ll be able to verify this yourself if you decide on starting a Joomla website. This CMS allows you to set meta descriptions and keywords for the article using a specialized built-in form. This is a very useful feature, but it’s not sufficient. Working with Joomla, you can add more handy SEO features by using its specialized extension EFSEO. That will give you as much SEO power as this system is capable of having. However, it’s no match to Yoast SEO for WordPress, despite WP having no good optimization features in its default configuration.

A CMS also has the power to make various website elements “uncrawlable” meaning they won’t be ranked by Google bots. That’s a complete disaster that will rob you off any chance at success. One of the main concerns is a CMS that generates duplicate pages. These systems do this because they add the visitor’s ID to every URL. Dynamic URL strings confuse Google crawlers and prevent them from ranking your website properly.

How to Make CMS Affect Your SEO the Right Way

There’s only one solution to all your SEO issues caused by CMS, namely changing your platform. This can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. However, no other method will do much good, unless you discover a super-SEO plugin for your system that you’ve yet to use.

When choosing a CMS system, be sure to pick one that will give you access to the pages’ code. This is vitally important for making the best optimization. You should also choose a system that allows you to work with meta data quickly and efficiently.

Forgetting about dynamic URL strings is also a must. But you also need to understand that no CMS has many major SEO elements management tools by default. This means you’ll need to install a plugin or an extension of some kind anyway.

If the system doesn’t allow it or has a very small number of options to choose from, it might not be able to provide the highest-quality of optimization. Therefore, it’s always smart to go with flexible platforms that can offer some multi-featured SEO solutions. Make your final decision by comparing the quality and functionality of those plugins.

If you go for a big platform like WordPress, make sure to keep all your software updated as not doing this will increase the risk of security breaches. You should also run regular checks to see if any of the updates compromised the ‘co-existence’ of all third-party elements that make up your website.