Se Friendly Content Management Systems - Advice Pls, Was wondering... Options

[lister]

I read Jill's pinned article about CMS and it is an interesting read.

I was wondering if we could get some input from the below conclusions that were written in the article 5 years ago...(the article/interview is apparently from 2003?)

1. Search engines have problems creating links to dynamic content.
2. If you can recognize these problems, you are halfway to getting your dynamic content indexed.
3. Where practical, use static URLs to reference dynamic content.
4. Otherwise, try to ensure your dynamic URL is linked to by content referenced by static URLs.
5. Consider using paid-inclusion programs.

Following from the above, is there a CMS that really has been proven to allow bots to crawl in and around your pages?

I thought Id ask since I am soon to be installing a CMS and would for obvious reasons prefer a well known Content Management ( SE Friendly) System

(This has probaby been asked before so if you could point me to the thread that would be very useful)

Thanks as usual for all posts (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

This post has been edited by lister: Feb 5 2008, 05:42 PM

[Randy]

Dynamic content isn't nearly the issue that it once was for the search engines. Basically you now need to only make sure you cross a few t's and dot a few i's.

1. Don't use a CMS that requires a cookie in order to display content. You can request to set one, just don't require it.

2. The same goes for Session IDs. Don't require one to be in the URL string in order to view content.

3. Try to limit the number of variables (the part after the ? in the url) to 3 or fewer. For new sites I try to stick to 2 or fewer, which is usually all you need anyway.

4. As with any site, static or dynamic, make sure each page is available via links at one and only one location. This can get a bit trickier with dynamic pages because typically the variable order won't matter to the script. So make sure your navigation remains consistent throughout. In other words, if you main navigation points to a page with ?categoryID=something&pageID=else make sure all of your links point in that same order. Don't have any pages linking to the same page as ?pageID=else&categoryID=something

That's really it.

Unlike years past, these days most CMS systems and shopping carts are pretty search engine friendly right out of the box. So normally no extra effort is required.

[mcanerin]

You might want to look into Plone.

I just(!) finished a CMS report for one of my clients and did several months of research into all the major CMS (and many minor) systems. I looked at them from both a usability and SE Friendly perspective (it was a 25 page report and took 3 months to complete).

My client had no significant budget constraints and could have chosen anything, but in the end my recommendation was Plone, which was a bit of a surprise since it's 1) open source and 2) wasn't even on my radar before I started the whole process.

A list of sites made in Plone (including Novell, Yale, etc) that demonstrates the kind of designs you can make with it.

Official Plone Site.

And nope, I'm not affiliated in any way. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

On the other hand, Plone can be difficult to install (though it's easy to use). If you are looking for something really simple to use that still looks good, I would also suggest Joomla (for user friendliness) or Wordpress (for support and extendability in a Blogging platform), depending on the type of site you are thinking of.

Ian

[lister]

Wow thanks for the advice. I have heard of Plone and in fact I was using it very recently in a part time position i had. I will research the software more now. It seems therefore that Plone might be a viable option when creating a new SE friendly CMS driven website. Thanks again.

[madams]

Nice of you to share 3 months of hard work Ian!

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/thumbup1.gif)

[lister]

Nice of you to share 3 months of hard work Ian!

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/thumbup1.gif)

I know thanks again.

[drmadcow]

I'd go with Drupal or another PHP system before Plone, count me out of Python (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Spider Silk Desi...]

Another vote for Drupal here - it handles clean URLs very nicely, and the templating is very flexible, so you can easily build sites using clean semantic markup.

And a word of caution about Joomla - while it's a good CMS in many ways, at least as of version 1.0.x, it was not very SEO-friendly. Using the clean URLs option tended to break a lot of components, and even more importantly, the code it generated was anything but semantic. For example, page headings were not put in h1 or h2 or any kind of header tags at all, but in a table cell that used a particular CSS ID to identify and format it. So you could make your page headings look like anything you wanted through templating, but there was nothing in the code to enable a search engine to recognize them as headings.

I think version 1.5 is supposed to be better on this, but I haven't really had a chance to check it out yet, as I've been increasingly shifting to Drupal for all my CMS sites.

[mcanerin]

I don't want to get into the Drupal/Joomla holy war here, any more than I want to get into the mac/pc/linux one. I will say that if Python sucked Google wouldn't be programmed in it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink1.gif)

This is the short review for Drupal in the report I did:

Drupal: Drupal is flexible, easy to use and install. Drupal’s history is as community building software – it has excellent support for blogging and news, but is not as well suited for traditional websites. It’s easier to customize templates than Mambo/Joomla and writing extensions is easier than Plone, but it has poor workflow and it’s difficult to exert fine control over text positioning without writing your own template engine. There is excellent community support available, including many consulting companies.

Here is the short review for Mambo/Joomla:

Mambo/Joomla: The background for Joomla (a branch of Mambo) is as a blogging platform, and both offer excellent blogging abilities, can be search friendly and have very strong community support. However, there is no drag and drop, undo, workflow, load balancing, and only limited UTF-8 support. Additionally, built in security is poor and it is not very SSL compatible. Joomla is much more capable of customized design/template work than Drupal, though it's harder to do. Joomla is one of the easiest to use CMS available from a user standpoint.

Ian

[MaKa]

Still trying to make my mind up whether to continue developing my own CMS or switching over to something as Drupal which I had a play with. Maybe I should have a look and implement a trail design to see whether I find any issues with text positioning.

Thanks for sharing!