CMS or Content Management System is like an instant coffee machine. In an instant coffee machine, you don’t need to know the techniques of coffee making.
Likewise, a CMS can help you build your website even if you don’t know anything about writing codes. It is software that helps you create, manage, and modify content on a website without the need for you to specialize in technical knowledge.
A CMS provides you with the infrastructure to create web pages and store images, functions, and other information so that you don’t have to build one for your website on your own.
CMS takes care of all that so you can concentrate more on the website’s actual content rather than being busy with the infrastructure.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization helps your webpage perform better by helping it rank higher on a search page. SEO is the best practice to grow organic traffic on your website.
When a user searches, he is more likely to click on the websites on the very first page of the search results to find the answer to his query. By ranking your website higher with the help of SEO, you rank your website on that first page of search results, which in turn increases the organic traffic on your website.
While SEO can be done using various tools and practices, if you want to do it right, we recommend doing it from the very start. While CMSs are somewhat similar in function, they have different ace attributes according to their build.
And all CMS platforms are not created equal when it comes to search engine optimization.
First, let us ask a fundamental question:
Why a Good CMS Platform is Required For SEO?
Imagine starting a new business; let’s say you want to open a shopping mall. Where will you want it to be situated? In the Market, in the middle of the city? Or Out of the city? It is a silly question to ask, right? Of course, you will have it situated in the market in the middle of the town.
The CMS platform is the land on which you will build your online shopping mall and website. It may be an information website, a blogging website, or any other type of website, but if you want to earn from it, you need to have it located in the area of the highest possible performance. That’s how important choosing a good CMS platform is.
The performance of your website depends on it. If you want to rank highly in search engine ranking positions (SERPs), then you should use a content management system that is equipped with features that improve your ranking.
Now, as we have established the importance of a good CMS platform, let us find the features that we are looking for.
Also Read: What Are The Benefits Of A Website For Small Businesses
What are the Must-Have CMS Features for SEO?
If you want to choose CMS for SEO, look for these features:
1. Page Optimization
Any good CMS system helps you create SEO-friendly pages and formats. When designing your website, look for a solution that can create HTML pages that search engines can easily crawl up or that can create an SEO-friendly permalink.
2. Customizable Page Elements
You must be able to customize the title, meta description, and image alt texts of your posts and pages; these are essential for your on-page SEO. You can help the browser, and the user better understands what your page is about when you’ll be able to add keywords at different spots. This will increase the ranking of the webpage on the SERPs.
A good SEO-friendly CMS helps you keep count of the number of characters in the Title and Meta-description of your webpage because keeping a limit on the number of characters is a good practice for good SEO.
Also Read: Importance Of Mobile-Friendly Website & How Do You Make It?
3. Blogging Tools
You should choose a CMS platform with good blogging tools and templates to help you start your journey, as blogs are the most common forms of media used in content strategies. It should contain tools like a drag-and-drop editor with modules of images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and more like these tools that can be used to create engaging blogs
Also Read: Website Optimization Tips To Increase Website Performance
4. URL settings
An SEO-friendly CMS must be able to customize your URLs into SEO-friendly URLs which are short and descriptive, containing keywords. Search Engines are lazy readers; they don’t want to read a lot; they just want to read as less as possible to understand something; your CMS must be able to do that.
5. Internal Links
Internal Links are the most essential on-page SEO elements! You must be able to link all your related content on a webpage effectively so that the search engine can know exactly how much you have on a particular topic, which improves your ranking for the keywords associated with that topic. You can link your work manually, but your CMS must have a built-in linking tool to automate the process.
6. 301 Redirects
Your CMS must help you easily create 301 redirects. Redirects are essential to any content audit strategy, as they can help you redirect outdated and redundant pages. Redirects allow you to avoid broken links and 404 error pages, and they also send any visitors of those outdated pages to the relevant content on your website.
7. SSL Certification
An SSL certificate is a standard security technology for securing information between a visitor’s browser and your website. SSL certificates are ranking factors after Google has acknowledged their importance. Most of the best-hosted platforms include an SSL certificate, and even third-party hosting providers for open-source CMS platforms add SSL certification to their plans.
Also Read: 9 Types of SSL Certificates – Make the Right Choice
8. Taxonomy
Taxonomy is a way to help search engines and readers understand the structure of your website and quickly find the content they’re looking for. Your CMS must offer categories and tags for organizing your content. With categories, you can separate your pages and posts into broad categories and then get more specific with tags. Some CMS systems offer advanced Taxonomy options, like Cluster.
9. XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps are the maps for your website. They list every single page on your website to help a search engine find, crawl, and index your content. Creating a sitemap manually requires a bit of coding and is very tiring. You must choose a CMS that can create one for you or at least provide you with a sitemap plugin.
Also Read: What is a Sitemap & Why Do You Need It?
10. Analytics Tools
Analytics Tools are the tools that you can use to monitor every aspect of your website. This is very important because if you want to grow your website, you need to constantly monitor everything on your website to be better the next time and cater to a larger audience every time.
CMS that can create a dashboard with different metrics is very important for you to know what can be improved, which will eventually help you grow. These are the fundamental features you are looking for in a good CMS platform. Let’s have a look at the best picks.
Top CMS Platforms For SEO
1. WordPress
WordPress is the most widely used CMS on the internet; it is behind over 44% of websites all over the internet. You can create an SEO-Friendly website on WordPress CMS. It enables you to add titles, image alt-text, meta descriptions, headings, and custom URLs to your posts and pages.
WordPress consists of hundreds of thousands of free and premium responsive themes. WordPress also allows you to change permalinks, and settings, create and manage navigation menus, and use categories and tags to organize your content in your dashboard.
WordPress also consists of thousands of free and premium plugins to add more functionality and security to your website. You can use the best WordPress plugins to create XML sitemaps, analyze your website, and literally for all kinds of stuff you need to do.
Moreover, WordPress is open-source software, which means it is FREE!
Pros and Cons of WordPress
PROS
- ✓ Installation is easy and FREE.
- ✓ Thousands of Themes and best SEO plugins to choose from.
- ✓ Easy to use and user-friendly interface.
- ✓ Customizable with capabilities for editing the website’s theme files, HTML code, and CSS code.
CONS
- ✓ No SEO functionality without Plugins. This can easily be overcome by using free SEO plugins, and if your budget allows, premium SEO plugins will do the magic.
- ✓ Not all themes are SEO-friendly. Choose yours wisely.
- ✓ No dedicated customer support.
Also Read: 11 Benefits Of WordPress Development For Your Website
2. HubSpot CMS
HubSpot is a user-friendly CMS perfect for an SEO newbie; it analyses pages and provides personal coaching. You can take its advice and always improve your website’s ranking. It is ideal for those who are complete newbies in SEO and who need a guide to help them through SEO optimization.
It offers blogging tools, responsive themes, built-in SSL certification, and an auto-generated sitemap. It also provides multiple tools for creating and managing navigation menus, a pillar page link module, and a URL redirects tool.
HubSpot CMS offers recommendations as you customize your page or post, which helps the website perform better. It offers a dedicated data analysis tool for you to analyze the performance of your overall website or an individual post or webpage.
HubSpot CMS provides several built-in features that help in your website’s performance, maintenance, analysis, and modification.
Pros and Cons of Hubspot
PROS
- ✓ Seamless integration with HubSpot’s CRM platform, including Marketing Hub, Service Hub, and Sales Hub.
- ✓ Seamless integration with HubSpot’s CRM platform, including Marketing Hub, Service Hub, and Sales Hub.
- ✓ SEO-friendly themes.
- ✓ Recommendations to improve performance and ranking.
- ✓ Robust Support.
- ✓ Free version is available.
CONS
- ✓ A bit on the expensive side for local businesses, freelancers, and sole proprietors.
- ✓ Migration takes time, depending on your previous CMS provider.
- ✓ Hands-on onboarding costs $800 (one-time).
3. Joomla
Joomla offers software extensions to extend the functionality of your website and templates to customize your site’s visuals. Joomla provides more out-of-box features than WordPress, though the process of installing them is not as easy as WordPress; it’s a give-and-take situation. More capability, less convenience.
For SEO, Joomla works phenomenally in optimizing larger businesses and e-commerce websites. It allows you to make key SEO tweaks without extensions easily. It helps you manage URLs and site architecture more efficiently, which is a relevant feature for bigger websites that routinely add and remove content.
It also contains a lot of add-on SEO tools that help you in URL generation, structuring your content for Google snippets, creating an XML sitemap, and implementing redirects.
Pros and Cons of Joomla
PROS
- ✓ More in-house SEO options.
- ✓ One of the fastest CMS.
- ✓ Diverse extension library to make SEO tweaks.
- ✓ Responsive templates.
CONS
- ✓ It May be difficult to transition from an easier CMS like WordPress.
- ✓ XML sitemaps require a plugin to generate and submit.
- ✓ SSL certificate is not included.
- ✓ Manual edits to the robots.txt file to enable the crawling of images and other media.
4. WIX
Wix helps you easily make a clean and professional-looking website from scratch and also consists of the best SEO tools. Wix sites load quickly and can be optimized for mobile easily, which makes them rank higher on search engines. You can very easily make a website on Wix with its simple drag-and-drop mechanism for building the website.
Wix SEO is a knowledge base that explains how to build and publish a website capable of competing in the SERPs, which you can use to build SEO optimized website. You can easily handle SEO essentials from your dashboard on Wix.
Wix is ideal for freelancers, local businesses, and sole proprietors, but if you are looking for something for your bigger business and need to use advanced SEO, it is not for you.
Pros and Cons of Wix:
PROS
- ✓ Easy to use for beginners with features to implement SEO at a high level.
- ✓ SEO Wiz is a valuable resource.
- ✓ Easy managing of fundamental SEO features through the dashboard.
- ✓ SSL protection and auto XML sitemap creation and submission to Google Search Console.
CONS
- ✓ It is not ideal for bigger businesses and enterprises.
- ✓ You can’t change your template once you’ve applied it; choose carefully.
- ✓ It can be slower than its competitors.
- ✓ Not all Wix sites are guaranteed responsive.
5. Magneto
Magneto, now known as Adobe Commerce, is ideal for you if you are looking to build and optimize an online store for search. It has a similar User Experience to WordPress, and some standard SEO features are built in.
If you want to go in advance, you’ll have to download an extension. You can choose a responsive theme, add a meta description, optimize the alt text, create an XML sitemap for your site, add navigation menus, and remove duplicate content easily.
You can either do all this manually if you have SEO experience, or you can download extensions like SEO Content Optimization by ReloadSEO, Magento SEO Suite Pro extension, Advanced SEO Suite by Mirasvit, Manadev Layered Navigation SEO, and Creare’s Free Magento SEO Extension to automate or simplify these tasks for you.
Pros and Cons of Magento
PROS
- ✓ You can make URLs more SEO-friendly by customizing your URLs.
- ✓ Magento allows you to add meta descriptions to your product pages.
- ✓ An XML sitemap is included.
- ✓ Large integration marketplace with many SEO apps and tools.
CONS
- ✓ Requires extensions to offer full SEO capabilities and tools.
- ✓ It doesn’t create an HTML sitemap, compromising user experience.
- ✓ No built-in blog functionality. Extensions are there.
This is just the First Step. You must Have an SEO plan for your website. Congratulations on taking the first step toward an SEO-optimized website! Keep in mind that this is just the first step.
For better performance of your website, you need to have a proper SEO strategy for your website.
You’ll have to use tools and add keywords to your content and many other things as well to make your website perform at its peak. Nonetheless, you are a step closer to your peak performance.
Conclusion
Choosing a good CMS can be a hassle, but we hope after reading this, you may be able to understand your need better, and you’ll be able to choose a good CMS for your Website.
THESE ARE JUST A FEW OF MANY GOOD CMS PLATFORMS. There are a lot of other platforms that you can choose from always keep in mind the must-have features, and you can go for whichever platform you think is good enough for you.
But you must remember that there is no such thing as an ideal. You’ll have to compromise on one thing to gain access to the other. That’s why you need to prioritize your goals.
Have a Successful Hunt for the CMS of your Dreams!
