Content management systems (CMS) are a great way to help manage your online presence. However, the problem is that most CMSs harm your site’s search engine rankings (SERPs).
This case is true for all industries. Whether managing your real estate business website, creating content for your marketing agency, or building an eCommerce business, your CMS can hurt your SEO.
As an entrepreneur, you can easily keep your business on the good side of search engines with good SEO practices.
This is because these programs can create duplicate content and other issues that confuse search engines.
In this article, we’ll explore some ways that you can optimize your CMS so it doesn’t affect SEO negatively.
Table of Contents
User-Friendly URLs
A user-friendly URL is easy to remember and easy for search engines to crawl. If you’re using a CMS, make sure it allows you to create short, descriptive URLs easily.
You should also avoid URL parameters and redirects in your URLs—they’re confusing for users and can lead them astray if they don’t realize what’s happening or why it happened (more on this later).
URL Structure is Inconsistent or Confusing
Your website’s URL structure should be descriptive and easy to understand.
URLs should be consistent so that search engines can quickly determine the purpose of your site. For example, if you have a pet blog, you might want to use “pet food” as part of the URL. In that case, the URL could be http://www.yourwebsite/pet-food.
This way, users will know what they’re looking at when they click on it in their browsers or apps—and they’ll also get better rankings because Google gives more weight to sites with unique URLs than those without them!
Make sure your URLs are structured in a way that makes sense for human readers and robots (bots). In other words: don’t make it too complicated for humans but not so simple for bots!
Meta Descriptions, Tags, and Titles are Missing or Read Wrong
Meta descriptions, tags, and titles are all critical for SEO. They help search engines find your content, like Google.
Make sure that you’re using meta descriptions that are clear and concise. You want them to include the keywords you want to rank for and some keywords that have been added by users who have looked at your website recently (i.e., recent visitors).
You should also avoid using long or short sentences in your meta description—they should be no longer than 110 characters each—and don’t use any uncommon terms either!
Pages are Duplicated Across Different Subdomains
One of the most shared content management system (CMS) problems is duplicate content. Duplicate content can be a serious problem for Google, as it makes your site look like an affiliate marketer or spammy blog—and those sites often get penalized in search results.
This is because when you have multiple versions of one page on your website and no way to tell which version should rank higher than others, Google will pick whichever version you think is better at a best-of-three and fight between them over who gets somewhere near the top spot!
Duplicate Content Everywhere
Duplicate content is a big no-no. It can cause your site to lose rankings, and it’s easy to let this happen if you’re not careful. But there are ways to ensure duplicate content doesn’t happen on your website.
Use the same content in different places on your site (say, on both home and product pages), but make sure they’re unique! If they aren’t, Google will penalize you for duplicated keywords in multiple places across the web instead of just one place where they belong—and then start penalizing other sites!
You can also use a rel=”canonical” tag to show search engines which piece of potentially duplicate content is most important.
Your CMS can be your best friend or worst enemy regarding SEO
Your CMS can be your best friend or worst enemy regarding SEO. If you use a CMS, ensure it is optimized for SEO. If you are not using a CMS, consider using one!
A content management system (CMS) is a software system that helps manage websites by making them easy to use and maintain. They also allow each user on the site to create their unique version of the website’s content.
All of their edits are stored as part of the original file, so they don’t lose any information if something goes wrong while editing or uploading new pages.”
How to Make CMS Affect Your SEO the Right Way
So, how can your CMS impact SEO? The short answer is that it can. Here are some ways that search engines can detect your CMS and penalize you accordingly:
A hacker may have hacked your site on the Internet.
In the above case, even if you fixed the problem and removed the malware from your website, search engine spiders might still come across it while crawling through the web.
If they find something like this on an otherwise clean site, they’ll mark outbound links as “not followed” or “external” to warn other crawlers not to follow them.
This could result in lower rankings for your page if enough search engines notice that they’re off-limits! (Or worse yet – no rankings at all!)
Another option here would be to use Google’s Website Optimization toolkit. This will help ensure the proper configuration of your domain’s sitemap file so that when Googlebot crawls through it looking for relevant metadata about other pages on your site (like titles), it won’t see any irrelevant third-party content like images or scripts. Hence, ensuring better ranking opportunities for both parties!
Conclusion
If you want to increase your website’s organic traffic and rankings, the best way to do that is by building a beautiful website with a CMS that works in harmony with SEO. You can discuss this more with your web development service provider.
The more user-friendly your site is, the better you have of attracting new visitors—and the more likely they will come back.
With all these factors taken into account, it’s clear why making sure your CMS is optimized for searchability should be at the top of your mind for anyone who wants an SEO boost!
- How Your CMS Impacts SEO for YourBusiness (And What You Can Do About It!) - October 10, 2022
What a good reminder here. I’ve been keeping my links a lot more consistent by crafting short and sweet urls. This seems to work both for Google and for readers who like a neat link.
I try to be deliberate about doing this as well, Ryan. WordPress generates long slugs, but fortunately you can easily adjust them.