Keyword Ranking Problems with CMS (Content Management Systems)

CMS is a software program that allows the user to design web pages with little or no knowledge of HTML. While this makes it easy for a novice web designer, what the software dealers neglect to tell you is that these programs are usually not search engine friendly.

The reason CMS programs are not search engine friendly is because in order to design a web page by merely dragging text and images onto a page the program has to produce an enormous amount of code which results in code bloat.

CMS programs also don't effectively incorporate CSS (Cascading Style Sheets which control font colors, sizes, etc) and thus the code may be broken and the page may not load correctly in all browsers. The code may not validate either due to deprecated code being used by most CMS programs (code no longer in the code standard and which will be eliminated in browsers some day).

Also, CMS programs often utilize tables instead of CSS for formating pages which can cause a plethora of nested tables (tables inside of tables). The deeper content is within these nested tables the harder it is for the search engine to pick it up. Unless your code validates the search engine may get lost within your code and not properly index your content and trying to validate code on a CMS produced site is a job that even an expert web designer wouldn't want to tackle. The bottom line is, If search engines have a problem reading the code it will affect your keyword ranking.

One of the most serious problems with CMS programs is that most users don't realize they should not allow the program to set up titles but use unique titles on every page instead, using the keywords relevant to that page (not necessarily the business name).

They also need to set up unique description tags (which show up in search engines). If all descriptions are the same how is the user to decide which of your pages have the content they are looking for?

The default on some CMS programs is to set up file names with numbers which totally destroys keyword ranking because the keywords in file names help your rank. If the CMS program you are using doesn't allow unique titles and file names then you would be wise to find another program unless you want to pay for AdWords the rest of the life of your website.

Also some companies offer free CMS programs that are deliberately too complicated for a web design novice to figure out with the hope that you will hire them to finish your site (with an exhorbitant fee of course),

If you already have a website set up in a CMS program with duplicate titles and numbers for file names it can be fixed but your keyword rank can be delayed for months due to having to change them, even if redirects are set up to the new file names.

The drawback to not using CMS is you can't edit it yourself, however what good is a website if it doesn't rank in the search engines. It's better to get the website redesigned so ranking will improve.

Most of the websites I have redesigned were built with CMS programs that never went anywhere in the search engines.

Lori Eldridge
© 10-17-08
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