What Is A CMS?

A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to add, edit or 
delete content to your website without having to create and 
format the pages manually. All the pages get generated on the 
fly, the CMS application picks the template, adds the headers 
and footers, generates the menus and blocks for your page and 
then automatically renders the page. 

The main reason people hesitate to use CMS is because they 
think a CMS site will not perform well with search engines. But 
when used properly, CMS can actually help with scoring points 
with the search engines. This article shows you how.

We all know that content is king and that the primary function 
of today's Internet is to deliver content to those that are 
seeking it. CMS allows you to easily manage multiple pages on 
your site, categorized into appropriate topics and categories.

While it is a fact that most free CMS's available were not 
designed with the search engine spider in mind, CMS applications 
are flexible and can be tweaked to help you gain a top rankings 
with search engines.


How Do You Customize A CMS Application To Improve Search Engine 
Rankings?

First, there is the issue of dynamic URLs. Most CMS's will 
generate URLs with parameters embedded into them. As an example, 
each article link on your site may look like this: 

http://yoursite.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article
&sid=35&SESSIONID=200dbf5df81843102bc2ba2560207841

Not only does it look ugly, the search engines probably won't 
spider it. It's is best to cast that URL, into something like 
this:

http://yoursite.com/article35.html

This can be achieved by making use of the web server module 
called mod-rewrite. To use this, you'll need to add a rule to 
your .htaccess file using regular expressions to convert the 
URL. The following 2 lines added to your .htaccess file (in 
your document root) will achieve the URL conversion for the 
example above.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^article([1-9][0-9]*).* 
modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=$1
 

For more details on mod-rewrite, have a look at 
http://powersitesystem.com/article1.html

The session id is usually not necessary in the URL. Most users 
have cookies enabled so CMS can store the session id using 
cookies. URL rewriting for session maintenance can and should 
be turned off in your web server settings.


Which CMS Application Do You Use?

For my purposes, the PostNuke Open Source Content Management 
System works well. But there are many CMS applications available 
that are open source and are easy to install. To access a review 
of the various CMS's available see 
http://biz-whiz.com/article225.html - For a hands-free CMS setup 
with training to help build a search engine friendly website see 
http://powersitesystem.com


Site Navigation

Generally SEO's feel that having the navigation links at the 
bottom or on the right side of your page allow you to position 
your optimized content towards the beginning of your html page, 
but users are accustomed to naturally look for a navigation menu 
towards the top left of the page. Attention to the anchor text 
used in the navigation links is important because these links 
will appear on all the pages of your site. 


Islands of Related Content

When you add content to your CMS, you would classify it into a 
topic. A CMS like PostNuke, allows you to choose a category and 
a topic for each article that you add. The CMS will automatically
create links in the chosen category page and topics page. If you 
define your topics and your categories properly, you can create 
a brilliant linking strategy. 


Conclusion

Setting up a CMS managed website that can achieve good search 
engine rankings is possible if you take care of the key factors 
as outlined above. For proof that a properly customized CMS 
application can help you to gain top search engine rankings see 
the links in the signature below.