Technology
How CMS Affects SEO and What You Can Do About It
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 significantly impact your website’s optimization in the future. You must realize how SEO features are built into some CMSs and how you can improve upon them to maximize the visibility of your website. However, let’s recap what a CMS is and how it can be confused with other management systems, such as a DMS (digital asset management).
CMS versus DAM
Your business likely needs a CMS and a DAM (digital asset management) system.
A CMS is for your website, and it enables you to create and publish content on your website. Not that long ago, all new content had to be added via hard coding, requiring a web developer.
The CMS put the power of adding content on a website into the hands of non-technical people. With a CMS you can store digital files like videos and images text plus use its WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor to create and publish content. It’s user-friendly interface is a step up from writing an email but it’s not a huge leap in complexity hence WordPress is the most popular CMS powering nearly 40% of all websites.
DAM
A DAM is for your company-wide use of visual content. In a DAM, your business would store, share, and collaborate on media content. Your branding collateral, marketing visuals including videos, latest social media visuals, whatever it is the DAM is where it should be stored and managed. As your business reaches out more on social media, Youtube, video marketing, and PPC advertising, your third party suppliers can access and upload data, and your business can manage each version.
However, in this business blog, we focus on how your CMS can impact your website SEO.
How CMS Affects SEO: Mechanisms of Influence
Your CMS platform affects SEO in several ways:
- Its built-in optimization features enable you to make the content of your website more visible to Google bots.
- Its ability to integrate specialized SEO plugins allows you to expand the limits set by the built-in optimization features.
- The functionality of the content management system determines how much you can optimize your content.
The second factor is the most important when 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 system’s integrity. You’ll be able to verify this yourself. For example, 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 handy 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 of 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 correctly.
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 metadata 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 minimal number of options to choose from, it might not provide the highest quality of optimization. Therefore, it’s always smart to go with flexible platforms that can offer some multi-featured SEO solutions.
Another decision you need to make is where your website should be hosted – for example, you may choose a cloud-based hosting provider. Plus the Worhttps://www.businessblogshub.com/2022/01/cloud-security-threats-businesses-can-avoid/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>risk of security breaches using third party systems and plugins is there so do lots of reading on how to protect your online assets.