Bretts Marketing Bytes

What is a CMS (Content Management Systems)?
A CMS is a graphical user interface that allows you to add, update and delete pages on your website. The beauty of one of these systems is that it makes it easy for even a non technical person to make quick changes to their website.

In today’s day and age it is critical to have a CMS. One of the most common mistakes that companies make when they hire a web development firm to implement a CMS is that they trust their web developer too much.

Not to put web developers down, but the problem is most of them don’t keep up with SEO on a regular basis. That is why I always say SEO is a marketing function, not a development function. I can’t tell you how many times I go to work with a company and they just had their website re-designed and I say…I can’t help you unless you get this fixed. And their response is… But I just had this done; shouldn’t my web developer have told me this?

It is unfortunate because the customer has usually spent a significant amount of money on the system at this point. But more often than not, I can’t help them. So I put together this list of important elements that every CMS should contain.  If your web developer is not providing these, walk away. If they say, oh yes, we will do that; make sure you have it in writing. Below is the list.

1. Your website should be “designed” with valid XHTML. This is the look of your site. All too often I run into companies still using tables for layout. CSS is the only way to design a website correctly. You can check your site here.
2. Your website developer should avoid using flash as much as possible in the overall layout.  However, it is still ok to use snippets of flash on the home page.
3. Your CMS should allow you to change the page title tag on each individual page. The page title naming option should also be separate from the actual internal title of the page. For example: You might call a page About us internally, but the page title tag might be About ABC company.
4. Your CMS should allow the Meta tags to be updated on each individual page that is created. Unfortunately older systems would create a generic Meta description for the entire site.
5. Your CMS should have search friendly urls. Example of non friendly urls: www.yoursite.com?catid=124255. Here is an example of a Search Friendly URL:  www.yoursite.com/about-us.html
6. Your CMS should create dynamic HTML and XML sitemaps.
7. You should be able to have full control over the directory structure when creating an individual page. Example: www.yoursite.com/you-Should-Be-Able-To-Name-This-what-ever-you-want
8. Your CMS should have something in place to avoid duplicate content. Search engines will penalize you for duplicate content.
9. Your CMS must support Analytics.  I know this seems like a no brainer, but some systems still claim to have their own internal analytics. Not good, you should be able to have Google Analytics installed easily.
10. Support for RSS out of the box. You can use RSS to provide a site map to search engines, build up subscribers and many other related items.
11. Proper use of Robots.txt. This file will tell search engines which pages to crawl on your website. You do not want them to crawl your admin section.

So how can you be sure that your web developer is following the proper standards? You can’t, but you can hire someone to keep them honest and give you direction. I work with many companies to assist in this process.

I also recommend not paying for a proprietary CMS as you are then locked into their system. I use two open source systems that follow all of the guidelines above and do not cost a dime. They are called Joomla and Drupal. Both systems are extremely robust and provide some of the best SEO tools available on any CMS platform. I have taken existing website designs and put them on these systems and also created sites from scratch. Whatever you want to do, you can do it with these systems. Before purchasing a CMS system, take the time to look into both systems.

If your site currently doesn’t support content management, contact me and I will explain how to convert your existing site into a fully-functional CMS.

If you have any questions or comments to add to this article, please use the comment area. I would love to hear from you.  Good Luck!

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