CMS Applications For SEO

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CMS or Content-Management System is an application which can be very beneficial for SEO. A CMS, or in this case WCMS (Web CMS), is a software usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions.

Different SEO specialists and consultants have come to use CMS applications to easily and conveniently make several changes within a website that would help in their SEO campaigns such as the use of Meta tags, Alt Tags, Title tags, and more. This also saves from asking an already busy web developer for making changes in a web page. But the question now is, which CMS is the best. There are, however, too many CMS softwares to go around, thus usually brings the question on which of these CMS’ are the best when it comes to SEO.

After doing some research on which is the best when it comes to CMS for SEO, there are several names that came up from the list of prospectives. These names include:

Joomla!

Joomla! is considered by many as one of the most use-friendly CMS used not only for SEO, but also for other web-based applications. So what is Joomla!? Joomla! is a free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model – view – controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework. According to several SEO Philippines consultants, the system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization.

Popular features:

The Joomla! package consists of many different parts, which allow modular extensions and integrations to be made easily. These includes “Plugins”, “Components”, and “Modules”.

• Plugins are background extensions that extend Joomla! with new functionality. The WikiBot, for example, allows the author of Joomla! content to use “Wikitags” in Joomla! articles which will auto-create dynamic hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles when displayed. There are over 4,000 extensions for Joomla! available via the Extensions Directory.

• Components allow webmasters to perform such tasks as build a community by expanding user features, backup a website, translate content and create URLs that are more friendly to search engines.

• Modules perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc., to be inserted within the base Joomla! code.

Drupal:

Drupal, like Joomla!, is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites. SEO consultants have made several use of Drupal when it comes managing a website to set it up for On-Page SEO.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. According to SEO Philippines consultants, these include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts, administration menus, RSS-feeds, customizable layout, flexible account privileges, logging, a blogging system, an Internet forum, and options to create a classic brochureware website or an interactive community website. SEO specialists and consultants made use of Drupal when it was designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added by third parties, which in this case several features used for SEO. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management framework.

The good thing about Drupal is that although it offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.

SilverStripe:

Another great CMS for SEO is SilverStripe. SilverStripe is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for creating and maintaining websites. The CMS provides a web-based administration panel that enables users to make modifications to parts of the website. This panel includes a WYSIWYG website editor. Notable features of the SilverStripe CMS include:

• A modern, extensible web-application interface

• Drag and drop customization of tree-based navigation structure

• Customizable output markup with CSS-based, table-free defaults

• Work-flow management:Draft/Published separation through content staging, and document revision control/rollback with ‘compare’ functionality

• Highly configurable security/permissions model

• Data object model, automatic database schema generation, and a suite of CMS data controls to enable easy customization of inputs. asset management and image resizing

• Multiple templates per page

• Search engine friendly URLs, meta-data management, and automatic XML sitemap generation

• Full text search and RSS feeds

• Optimizations for heavy loads (e.g. manual cache refresh)

• Internationalization/Languages: SilverStripe supports multiple-language content. UTF-8 and the internationalization of character sets are supported.

WordPress:

Although not as popularly used for SEO compared to those mention above, many still use WordPress for SEO purposes. WordPress has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations.

According to several SEO Philippines consultants that use the application, WordPress also features integrated link management; a search engine-friendly, clean permalink structure; the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to articles; multiple author capability; and support for tagging of posts and articles. Automatic filters that provide for proper formatting and styling of text in articles (for example, converting regular quotes to smart quotes) are also included.

WordPress supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article. Finally, WordPress has a rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install.