SEO Pain Points – I Bet Your CMS isn’t SEO friendly

There are more than 600 CMS available in the market and everyday new cms are getting added to the list. Most CMS are made keeping one factor or the other in mind to achieve a desired aim, but CMS developers often forget to implement basic SEO features in the CMS which results in lower SEO rankings of the website.

To conclude, it’s sad but true, most CMS aren’t SEO friendly. Lets checkout the problems exists in major CMS available in the market.

SEO friendly URLs

This is one of the most important issues present in almost all the CMS out there. Most of the cms have dynamic urls which is quite difficult to get indexed by search engines. To make the situation even more worse, CMS suffix dynamic urls with session ids like oscid, zenid etc and these session ids creates duplicate contents for the website in huge numbers which is often harmful for the website. Even the CMS which supports seo friendly urls, doesn’t do it correctly. Accurate, descriptive, organized URLs help search engines understand the content of the page and help the user navigate your site easily. Once dynamic URLs and session ID URL start coming into play you’re on a hiding to nothing. You need to look for a CMS that allows you to customize your URL structure anyway you like

Inaccurate Page /URL hierarchy

Site hierarchy is another cool thing in usability and SEO. Hierarchy plays very important role in how search engine crawlers crawl, prioritize, and categorize site content.  A well-structured site that is organized into logical directories helps search engines distinguish between your most important, top-level content and less-relevant, deeper, sub-content and is very important for improving your website marketing efforts.

Control over the page titles, Meta’s and header titles

The major problem with the CMS is that you cannot control page title. Generally page titles are taken by default from page name or product name. If you change the page name page titles also gets changed automatically and even full featured control for meta keywords aren’t provided in many CMS. The CMS should provide full control as far as page titles and Meta’s are concerned.

SEO Friendly Redirects

It often happens in a cms that you have to rename a page which you find is no longer very relevant. Generally, in that case controls should be provided to the user in CMS so that old page gets redirected 301 either automatically or manually to the new renamed page. Most of the CMS does not provide this control.

Canonical Redirects

Major CMS does not pay attention to canonical tags Make sure you have complete control over implementing canonical redirects. Canonical urls should have both option like automatic and manual override control, Which is unfortunately not provided.

Control over Image ALT attributes

The ALT attribute is becoming an even more important on page factor. Make sure you’re able to use it for all of your images as this is the best option for letting the search engines know what an image is about. Mostly CMS’s lack this feature also.

Internal Anchor Text

Most of the CMS doesn’t provide you the ability to control internal anchor text. This is vital as you need the flexibility to customise the anchor text of your internal links to provide relevant link text for your site users and for the search engines to really understand the content of your site. This often comes handy in footer and sidebar portions where there links are automatically generated by the CMS.

Duplicate content…

Almost every CMS generates duplicate links. A CMS generally creates multiple versions of a single page by creating printer friendly pages, comments pages, and paginated pages with same content. Duplicate content should never be present on the website anyhow, so control should always be provided in the CMS to avoid generation or better yet indexation of duplicate pages. Now search engines avoiding duplicate content on their index and continue updating their search algorithm to avoid duplicate content. Read about these updates and algorithm and know What to do after Google Panda & Penguin Update?

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are good for users and search engines but only if done correctly. Its just like your guide on a website. You’ll usually find them above the main content area of the page with info such as “you are here > home > seo > seo services.” You should have the control of breadcrumbs generations and manipulations in a good seo friendly CMS.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps contains a whole new world of techniques to increase traffic and indexing ability of the website.  Google likes XML sitemaps and so every CMS should provide a control to build XML and html sitemap automatically and manually keeping everything in mind. Very few CMS does thing correctly. The CMS should also use notification services of search engines and other update services to notify them about the website updates. Even the CMS should provide control to manually control the sitemaps generations and manual control should also be provided to control update services.

404 Error Pages

Although not directly related to SEO but this is another important one for the site users usability which can even be used for improving SEO advantage. Make sure your CMS have the facility to have a custom 404 page and  you have the facility to customise the content of the page yourself. Search engines often hit 404 pages and if you have full control over 404 pages, you can use that opportunity to convert it into SEO advantage.

410 Error Pages

Unfortunately very few people know about 410 error pages. And rarely does any CMS developer implement this feature in their CMS’s.  Make sure you’re able to have a custom 410 page and have the ability to customise the content of the page yourself. This feature becomes handy when you have to remove spam content pages and duplicate contents pages at much faster rate. Benefit and use of 410 can easily be found out by searching Google.

Website Performance

Website performance is another factor which has been recently added to the search engines algorithms. These factors can easily be controlled through CMS settings but unfortunately no CMS implements these features perfectly. Most CMS developers never add these features in there CMS because they think that it is not very important. Features like gzip compression, custom headers, mod expires, caching, CDN’s can easily be integrated in CMS to improve performance which in turn improves SEO advantage but unfortunately you can find these features in very few CMS’s.

These features can be developed in a CMS but its never implemented or integrated because developers either do not have full knowledge about the use of development in SEO or they don’t want to put in extra hard work for implementing these facilities. And it’s quite obvious, as they never receive too much demand for these features from end users because huge portions of end users still don’t know that development is one of the most important factors in creating SEO friendly websites. At Outshine Solutions, we give you information that How much #1 Google Ranking worth to your business? because SEO and SEO Friendly development is more important than mere directory or article submissions.