Content Management Systems

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

Following on from Part Six: Site Architecture, this stage of my guide covers the considerations that start-up internet businesses should take when implementing a CMS (content management system). Choosing the wrong CMS is potentially fatal for your SEO plans, so I will cover here some of the recommended options and their benefits. To go back to the start of my guide click here.

Open Source Content Management Systems

Open source content management systems are an ideal solution for the vast majority of internet start-ups and small business websites with SEO on the agenda. It’s not necessary to pay for a content management system unless your website requires a highly bespoke solution or you are a big business dealing with confidential information such as financial data. Open Source solutions are free to download and install, however, most of them do require customisation for optimum SEO.

Why Are Content Management Systems Necessary?

Content management systems are not strictly necessary, however, they are strongly recommended if you wish to manage part or all of your content strategy in-house. When set-up correctly by your web developer, your CMS will enable you to create search engine friendly content quickly and easily without having to consult your developer each time you wish to do this. This means either yourself or your non-technical marketing staff can add news items, blog posts, information and product pages with only a minimal understanding of HTML. Content development is an important element of SEO, so having a flexible CMS that is usable by non-technical staff is a must for long-term search marketing plans.

Which Open Source Solutions are Best for SEO?

The most notable open source content management systems are probably WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. There’s not really any consensus on which system is “best” for SEO, however, each has its own benefits and drawbacks. Joomla, for example, is an ideal solution for large scale sites with SEO as part of the plan, however, implementation and development time is usually a lot higher than can be expected with WordPress. WordPress is an ideal solution for internet start-ups and small business sites, however, as it’s built as a blogging platform you need to be prepared to update your site on a regular basis; not doing so might possibly affect your rankings. The guys at alledia.com make this interesting point in one of their search engine optimization tests here. Both Joomla and WordPress continue to present canonicalization / duplicate content issues, although with correct implementation by your web developer these issues can be overcome. In the case of WordPress some of these issues can be fixed with a simple plug-in such as Joost de Valk’s Robots Meta.

Recommendation for Small Business SEO

My personal preference and the option I would most recommend to internet start-ups and small business sites with SEO objectives is WordPress. WordPress is very quick to set-up; there is a huge range of high quality, search engine friendly WordPress themes that can be purchased and adapted for those working on low budgets; there is a very large support community to help troubleshoot technical issues; the abundance of plug-ins available make the technical set-up of this CMS very straight forward and search results can sometimes be very fast indeed. I use WordPress for this site and I have used it for several of my clients’ sites. It’s sometimes possible to achieve page one results in a matter of minutes for established sites (Google, for example, uses a seperate spider to crawl and index blogs and will often place trusted posts high in its search results).

Content Management Systems and SEO Checklist

• Internet start-ups and small businesses should use an open source platform
• If you do use a bespoke CMS ensure the system is capable of generating standards complaint code
• Ensure that your chosen CMS allows you to create search engine friendly URLs
• Ensure that your chosen CMS allows you to add meta titles and descriptions independantly of on-page titles and content

Part Eight

In part eight I will cover the topic of WordPress in more detail and how small businesses on a low budget can implement this content management system in a cost effective manner. Click here to go to part eight.