Does Having A Content Management System Help Your SEO Ranking?

Getting the word out about your business is vital. You need to find ways to rise above your many competitors regardless of what products you sell or services you provide. Because online exposure is one of the vehicles you would like to use to tell the world about your company, you need to find a way to raise your rankings in the search engines. Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques is one of your best bets, but how do you go about it? Contrary to what you might think, it is not always the best idea to rely on just any content management system (CMS) to meet those needs.

First, let’s clarify what a CMS is. A CMS is an application that allows you and those with whom you are collaborating to publish, edit, organize, delete and maintain the content of your website from a central location. A CMS can enable you to create, archive and distribute press releases, web pages, articles and blogs as well as record and track inventory information, invoices and much more.

In many cases, content management systems were not created to be vehicles that would help businesses rise in the SEO rankings. Often, a CMS will use dynamic page URLs that contain special characters like equals and percent signs. Another red flag that CMS platforms often display to the search engine spiders is bad meta tags, faulty HTML codes used to describe the nature of the page in question. Frequently, CMS systems prohibit you from assigning relevant, unique tags to the titles and descriptions of their pages.

Another problem is that often, CMS systems will not allow you to create URLs that are rich in the keywords that will drive people to your website. Through CSS-based navigation and Schema markup, you can actually create content that the search engines will respond to. However, following the prohibitions of your CMS might render your page virtually invisible to the Google search robots.

Fortunately, it is possible to have the best of both worlds. CMS applications are now available that implement commonly requested SEO tasks “out of the box.” These include URLs that search engines will recognize, 301 redirects and proper meta tags included, with no need to make additional modifications to your server.

Once you have these more user-friendly tools in place, you can begin to accentuate your SEO content to bring the maximum amount of traffic to your website. Online tools abound that will help you analyze the strength of your content and predict how well received it will be by the search engine bots. For the best results, you and everyone with whom you are collaborating should be able to create content and simultaneously optimize it.

A search engine optimizing CMS is just what you need for this purpose; it will enable users of all skill levels to easily insert URLs that are rich in relevant keywords, descriptions, titles and image alt texts. Ideally, your system should provide real-time feedback that will enable you to know just how effective your content will be.

Sure, all of this might seem a bit complicated at first. However, taking the time to learn the basics of CMS platforms, particularly search engine optimizing CMS platforms like WordPress, could catapult your business to a new level of popularity. After all, getting the word out is a vital first step. Use these tools and run with them, and you just might be amazed by the results.