Search Engine Optimization SEO Articles :
CMS and Search Engine Optimization

What is CMS ?
CMS stands for content management system . A computer software program mostly used to create/delete/modify/manage files and folders on a hosted space.CMS makes it easy for a novice webmaster or website administrator to manage the overall site without much technological/programming knowledge expected.
There are a tons of open source and freeware based on PHP and MySQL Content Management Systems(CMS) available on the www.

Advantages of using a Content Management System (CMS)
- Easy to distinguish between content, structure and design.
- Layout definations
- Time saving for multiple changes across pages
- Using a Graphical User Interface(GUI), a WYSIWYG ( What You See Is What You Get) Editor, content creation and documentation can be made in no time. Importing files ( sound, video ,flash etc) is easy as compared with direct coding techniques.
- Easy updates possible as you can make changes to your website by using browsers like Internet Explorer (IE) or FireFox (FF)

SEO Friendly CMS :
The concerns regarding a Content Management System (CMS) to be search engine friendly are discussed below:
- CMS structure is generally not flexible unless you are good at tweaking the code.
- Excess code is generated per page giving the HTML extra load ( in term of scripts and definations etc)
- Most of the CMS dont conform to W3C ( World Wide Web Consortium) standards on web page layouts.

For SEO parameters to be looked while choosing a CMS for your needs include:
- Dynamic URL Optimization - Here changing the URLs to simplified ones help users as well as engines in case you are passing too much parameters for a single string/URL. Using Mod Rewrite can be of good help.
- Related Meta Tags generation as per the content and Unique title tags per page.
- CMS Templates with javascript codes can be replaced using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as some search engines find it difficult to read a script.

Popular Open Source CMS are:
- Drupal.org
- Joomla.org
- typo3.com