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March 18, 2005

Content Managment Systems and SEO

Content Management Sytems can be a great way to (fairly) easily build a full-featured, community-oriented site. However, they have not traditionally been designed with an eye towards search engine optimization.

With that in mind, here's a couple things you'll want to be aware of when choosing a CMS:

First, what kind of URLs does it generate? Most content management systems generate long, ugly, dynamic URLs which can be difficult for some search engine spiders to navigate. For example, here's one from Amazon's CMS (broken up to avoid trashing my site layout):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0071380396/
qid=1111188594/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/103-1463337-2540604
?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

That's not a search engine friendly URL. Of course, Amazon can get away with it, since they're one of the most highly trafficked sites on the Internet. Your site may not have that luxury. Try to find a CMS that uses a tool like mod_rewrite or IIS_rewrite to keep those dynamic-looking URLs to a minimum. This can be hard to do, since most content management systems use dynamic URLs heavily. You'll likely have to modify the URLs yourself using mod_rewrite.

Second, avoid having a session IDs placed in your URLs. Nearly all spiders will avoid any link that looks like it might have a session, or tracking, variable embedded in it. In a simplified example, say a spider downloads your page and you're using sessions. On its first pass, the spider might get a url that looks like:

http://www.yoursite/shop.cgi?session=dkom2354kle03i

The spider downloads that page, does some processing on its servers, then returns to your site to download some more pages. When it gets back to your site, it now sees a URL that looks like:

http://www.yoursite/shop.cgi?session=hj545jkf93jf4k

It's the same page, just a different session variable, but to the spider it looks like a brand new URL, so the spider downloads it again. In this way, a spider can get trapped downloading the same page over and over again. Since this can cost a search engine huge amounts in time and resources, they tend to avoid any pages that have session IDs.

This can be another issue that's tough to get around with many content management systems. The CMS needs some way to track your users, and its two primary options are cookies or URL-based session IDs. Since many users have cookies disabled, the CMS will often default to session IDs. And, of course, search engine spiders don't accept cookies, so they also get served session IDs. The best way to get around this is to implement some very basic cloaking on your site which will identify search engine spiders and make sure they don't get served session IDs.

Finally, look for a CMS which doesn't produce a huge mess of non-compliant HTML code. Such code can be difficult for a search engine spider to parse. Find something that produces clean, standards-compliant code (HTML 4.01 Transitional is best), and, most importantly, lets you specify your own page titles and description meta tags. Many content management systems produce their pages by pulling various parts out of a database and cobbling them together. This can make it difficult to get your keywords in the right locations on your pages.

I haven't used many content management systems recently, so I don't know which ones may now comply with the above requirements. I have heard some good things about Hot Banana, which is supposedly designed to be a "SEO friendly" CMS:

http://www.hotbanana.com/

However, I've haven't used it myself. You might want to give it a look and see if it will work for you. I'd certainly appreciate any feedback you have should you decide to use it.

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