CMS programs available today can have a negative effect on the visibility of the website in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). This makes CMS without Search Engine Optimization (SEO) abilities a big disaster. The major reason cited is that these programs were not designed keeping the search engines in mind.

Systems now days blabber that they are “search engine ready” or “search engine friendly”. What these blabbers mean is that a programmer can modify the system with add-ons (e.g. the Apache “mod-rewrite” extension) to not damage search engine results too badly. So do not fall blindly for such claims and make sure you inspect every aspect of the system to be sure that your website can be optimized. CMS that has the capability to induct common SEO tasks (human/search engine readable URLs, 301 redirects, Meta tags) directly is required.

I would like to specify some common problems that CMS generated contents face in not being indexed by the search engines:

• Dynamic URLs with query strings

The number of dynamic pages a search engine can index are limited. If at all you use dynamic pages make sure that not every search engine crawl the dynamic and static page. A Dynamic URL like “http://www.yourseite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234” might be skipped by a search engine crawler as too many parameters included might clash with webmaster parameters. Inbound links tend to be less on dynamic URLs as any user prefers static URLs as they are easily understandable.

• Restricted Meta Tags

Due to ever-changing nature of SEO industry, customized Meta tags like Verification Meta tag for Google are in high use. Many CMS do not have access to add such customized Meta tags. This hampers the SEO process as the customized Meta tags have become quite important for search engine crawlers.

• URLs with poor keyword density

Keyword rich URLs play a major role in optimizing your website on search engine pages. Some systems that use static URLs sometimes do not let you create URLs with desired keywords. A query string without sensible keywords hardly lures traffic to your website.

• Using third party SEO tools with most CMS systems is time consuming and repetitive

The user desires to be in one tool to create content and another to analyze it. But in some CMS, it is mandatory to view the pages live from a URL on the web to use SEO tools to optimize the content. In such systems until and unless the content is published SEO cannot come into picture. This makes it highly time consuming.

• Lack of SEO knowledge

Buying a CMS and then hiring SEO professionals to optimize your CMS for SEO needs is wasting lot of time and lot of money. It is better to have a proactive approach to search friendly CMS.