CMS - What is it?

• Jul. 25, 2003

If you own a website nowadays you've probably been caught up in the new acronym for what's hot on the web - CMS.  CMS stands for Content Management System.  CMS is a software package which allows you to easily add or modify your web site's content without having to know extensive coding techniques like DHTML, Javascript and so on.

The foundation of most CMS systems is simple - first you create a template which you will use to display your pages.  In general, one template is all you need for your entire site.  From there, you use the provided software to add content to the site.  This usually means entering the content in some form of dashboard and when you're done, the data is written into a database.  When a user requests a page it is usually created on the fly by pulling the appropriate data from the database and displaying it in the template.

There are many examples of CMS out there from many different sources.  In fact, this article itself is stored in a simple CMS system.  The page is a template, while the text on the page is stored in a database.

So now that you know what CMS is and what it can do for you, I'm going to give you some pointers that you will want to ask the CMS salesperson.  These questions should help you determine which CMS is best for you, after you've figured out what you need from it.  In other words, decide what you want from it, and find those systems that satisfy those desires, and then ask the following questions:

The first is: How search engine friendly is the CMS?

There are a few CMSs which are designed with search engines in mind, but not many that I've seen.  By search engine friendly I mean "does it support unique meta tags for each page and are they easily modified"?  Can the CMS display static pages or does it require session variables and other dynamic variables to work properly?  Can you apply your own logical file structure to the system or is it set to a default?  By this I mean, can you organize files in the top 2 or 3 folders, or does it bury content in some long obscure path like: http://www.somesite.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/yet-another-folder/why-not-one-more-folder/filename.htm?

If you answered no to any of the above questions, I'd keep shopping. Here's why:

Unique meta tags?  You need unique meta tags because pages perform better on search engines if they are all unique - that not only means unique text content but unique meta tags that match the text content.  You also want the ability to easily go in and modify the meta tags and content to help improve your search engine rankings, and ultimately traffic (and hopefully sales).

Static pages?  You want the pages to appear static to the search engines and be able to display without any types of session variable, or other identifiers needed to help build the pages. For example, the page called: http://www.somesite.com/page.htm&sessionid=1&page=3&content=4 will not perform as well as a page called http://www.somesite.com/content4/page3.htm.  Not only will search engine spiders run screaming when they see sessionid (because session ids tend to catch them in a never ending loop on the site) but the static pages tend to perform better in search results than dynamic pages.  Even more so in highly or even moderately competitive search markets.

Folder structure?  You should have the ability to organize the files the way you see fit.  Ideally, it would be best if all the pages could reside in the root folder, but if you don't like that you should have the ability to organize them in subfolders off the root.  We recommend no more than 3 folders deep however, as the deeper the pages reside, the lower their relevancy is considered to be.

The second question is: What platform does it need to run on?

Some CMS are built to run on a Linux or UNIX server while others are designed for a Microsoft IIS platform.  Depending on what hosting you may already have, the answer to this question could affect you dramatically.  Before you consider moving your site to a CMS on a different platform, read the article on how to move a website to see what the implications could be of such a switch.

The third question would have to be: What kind of customer service does the CMS company offer?

For example, can they build custom modules for you, or are you committed to only what you get in the box they sell you?  In many cases we've heard of people who thought they had the perfect CMS only to find that they needed features later on which were not available to them.  In these cases, you may have to hire an independent programmer to build the custom application, and this can get expensive.

As you can see, there should be many more questions you ask when considering any kind of content management system.  From our point of view as search engine marketing consultants we feel the search engine friendly questions need to be answered first before getting into things like platforms, customer service and so on.  After all, what's the point of building this great looking; customer friendly website which is packed full of useful content, only to find out that it's virtually invisible to the rest of the web?

Rob Sullivan
Production Supervisor
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning
specialists