CM Systems not search engine friendly?

[DXL]

I recently had a client ask me to incorporate a content management system into their site as opposed to adding news and archiving articles through a regular html editor. I'm concerned as to what effect Content Management Systems have on search engines, the whole purpose of adding news articles was to generate more traffic for searches related to his industry.

I don't know if I'll be able to properly meta tag the pages individually if I use a CMS, or if the page titles every change. Are there any negative effects with regards to search engine results?

[MrSpeed]

I was looking for an SE friendly CMS. I looked at Joomla and Drupal.

I ended up using Wordpress. It's so simple to install and use. You can easily customize it so it doesn't look like a blog.

[TravelGirl]

I am in the process of choosing cms software too.
I use Wordpress for my blog and are happy with ti regarding SE positions. I am not shure about customising it to run it on the whole site, so I now consider Joomla too...

[pmkpmk]

If you don't mind a steep learning curve, consider Typo3. I'm maintaining a few PR6 sites with it.

[mack]

Typo3 is great, but as was pointed out there is a steep learning curve.

I belive it may be possible to build using typo3 localy then upload the pages? Not 100% about this.

Mack.

[pmkpmk]

Yes, this is possible (though it perverts the concept a bit).

[DXL]

When you say "learning curve", are you referring to the installation process or use by people uploading to the site? I'm going to have people who are not tech savvy at all who want to upload new articles to a site. I don't want to sacrifice meta tagging and SEO benefits in general just for ease of use, we're talking one article a week, if that. It would take me a few minutes to add an article and/or archive an old one, I don't know that one article a week warrants a content management system.

[bedlam]

When you say "learning curve", are you referring to the installation process or use by people uploading to the site?

On the developer end, Typo3 is very complex--but you can do virtually anything you need to with it.

On the user end, I find that one session of between two and four hours and maybe a short, follow-up session is adequate for training most editors--but the trainer does need to know the system very well to pull this off.

-b

[pmkpmk]

Yes, I referred to the installation, configuration and the development of the design-template. But as was mentioned before: there's almost nothing you can't do with Typo3 :-)

From the editor perspective it's rather easy and can even be made easier when the editor's access to features gets limited to the very minimum.

[mack]

You can install typo3 on your windows pc to get used to it. There is an installer that includes server, database etc.

There is a lot of reading involved in mastering typo3. I recomend you install it and play around with it. You will soon realise if it's for you, or not.

Mack.

[incywincy]

I think the focus of the question was to do with SEO friendliness.

We had the same problem and toyed with using off-the-shelf CMS. We only wanted a simple CMS to enable our users to enter a page of text, some photos and contact email for an auto-generated contact form. In the end we implemented a simple CMS ourselves using php and integrating an html editor called FCKeditor [fckeditor.net]. This is a simple html editor that is as easy to use as MS Word.

Writing our own, simple CMS allowed us to have total control of the html. The result is that our CMS generated pages all have optimised page elements and rank exceptionally well.

If you only want a simple CMS I'd recommend writing it yourself if you can.

[pmkpmk]

I think the focus of the question was to do with SEO friendliness.

As I said, I did several PR6 sites wiht high rankings with Typo3. Not off-the-shelve though, but all within the bounds of Typo3 (i.e. no external tweaks).

[incywincy]

According to Google Page Rank [google.com] is a measure of link popularity whereas CMS only affects on-page SEO factors.

A CMS shouldn't have any efefct on Page Rank

[mack]

A CMS shouldn't have any efefct on Page Rank

Not totaly true, sometimes PR can't be passed to internal pages due to url formations and redirects. So it can effect PR internaly.

Mack.

[tomse]

For Typo3 you will find the extension "realURL" which helps me alot with SEO the url.