This article only covers content management systems (CMS’s) that are suitable for traditional websites and blogs, if you are looking for a SEO friendly e-commerce solution check out this blog post instead: What is the best E-Commerce Solution for SEO?
There are a huge number of CMS’s available, the majority of them claiming to be search engine friendly; but how do you know which one to go for? What features should you be looking for? What are your options and which CMS do we think is the best for SEO?
First off, you need to know what features you need to be looking out for; read our guide to the basics of a search engine friendly website.
Let’s talk about a few of the popular options for a SEO friendly CMS.
WordPress was originally designed as a blogging system but has come a long way since then and can now be used to make fantastic looking, easy to edit, SEO friendly websites. According to Wikipedia, as of August 2011 it powers 22% of all new websites and is currently the most popular CMS in use on the internet.
Although you do need to tweak the settings initially and install a few plugins (such as Platinum SEO or Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin) to get the basic features but WordPress have made it very easy to install, configure and work with plugins. Once installed you will find a lot of the stuff is automatically set for you but Yoast have written a fantastic guide to optimising a WordPress site.
Drupal is another popular open source CMS system that powers websites like https://www.whitehouse.gov/ and https://data.gov.uk and just like WordPress, once SEO plugins have been installed, offers all the basic features of a search engine friendly website. Here’s a nice list of SEO related Drupal modules that you can use to make your Drupal website SEO friendly. Although for beginners it is more difficult to work with compared to WordPress it can do the job.
Joomla is another free open source CMS system (noticed the trend yet?) that powers some big websites such as https://www.linux.com/ and https://www.itwire.com/ – Although it’s not as user friendly as WordPress does offer all the mentioned features with the help of a few plugins, such as sh404sef
There are others available and we have worked with many other systems of the years but we feel these 3 are the only ones worth mentioning – If you feel we are missing a CMS that deserves a spot here please get in touch.
and finally…
Our Favourite SEO Friendly CMS
There is 1 obvious winner and I think most SEO’s out there will agree with me when I say WordPress is our CMS of choice. It’s so user friendly, and once you’ve installed a plugin or 2 it can do everything you want. It’s updated regularly, has a great community behind it and hundreds of plugins available to do almost everything you can think of. It’s not the most popular CMS in the world for no reason. If you’re interested in what WordPress SEO can do for your site, then please get in touch.
This blog post was written by Diana Esho – follow us on Twitter or Facebook for an inside look into the technical side of SEO.
