Choosing a CMS that Supports Your SEO Goals

A content management system (CMS) allows regular business owners with little or no technical experience to update and manage their websites quickly and easily. An effective CMS can also be a powerful tool for supporting your business' search engine optimization (SEO) strategy since it provides a powerful base from which you can develop and maintain your website's content, and, consequently, support your overall SEO goals.

Choosing the right CMS for your business is a complicated task and there are many different elements which need to be addressed, however, the one thing it is essential for you to remember when making your decision is that the CMS you choose needs to have the capability of helping your overall web marketing strategy which should include SEO.

So what can you do to make sure you’re choosing a CMS that will help your overall SEO strategy?

1. Widen your focus beyond the technology.  As we’ve mentioned before, one of the problems that many organizations have when attempting to choose a CMS is that they focus too much on the myriad technological aspects of a CMS rather than looking at its capabilities from the perspective of your overall marketing strategy. One of the most important aspects of a CMS is its ability to help non-technical users carry-out their marketing goals (like SEO). Ensure when you’re choosing your CMS that it has the ability to support creation and updates of your key on-page SEO elements. Often if the control of this type of decision is left in the hands of IT you end up with a technologically solution that doesn’t support other aspects of your marketing strategy.
2. Make sure all key stakeholders are involved.  This relates to our previous point about widening your focus. If one of the goals implanting your CMS is to support your SEO strategy then it’s crucial to have your team’s SEO expert as an active part of the decision making process because they will have insight into the necessary aspects of a CMS that other team members may not and they’ll ensure that your CMS solution is capable of allowing updates and creation of custom URLs, HTML coding, Title Tags, Alt Tags, and all the other essential SEO elements. 
3. Keep your assets intact. As recommended by Marketing Sherpa in a recent article, it’s important to make sure when you’re choosing a new CMS that it doesn’t discard your current digital assets. Over time a website will collect a large amount of assets including inbound links, pages, and content that rank highly in search engines. Losing these, even if you’re gaining a new CMS platform, can actually be detrimental to your overall SEO strategy. 
4. Know exactly what you're looking for. It is important when you are evaluating vendors that you are looking at solutions which have the core functionality that you actually need and want with regards to SEO.  Many CMS vendors offer products that are much more complex, or too simple for the SEO goals that you want to accomplish. Before looking at possible solution, it is a good idea to do a comprehensive analysis of what your needs are as an organization. Choosing a solution that has the correct functionality to meet your website’s SEO targets can ensure that you end up with a product which effectively meets all of your needs.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at August 11, 2010 8:00 AM

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