Content management systems are very appealing. Being able to give our clients the ability to make simple text changes and content updates on their own saves time for us and money for them. They’re also a slick way to manage large websites with lots of content, and can make theming a cinch for your designer/developer.

Once you decide to use a content management system, you have to choose one of the many available to you. Some are free, some are paid, and many have restrictions and flaws. Most systems are built to work very well with a specific subset of sites, and can be adapted for others (eg. WordPress.org is a blogging platform, but makes an excellent CMS with few modifications).

Factors to Consider

As you are exploring your content management system options, you should take into consideration what your website needs from the CMS and how it can make your job easier, faster, cheaper, or better.

Consider these questions when you are investigating:

• How does this system work for the type of website you run (ecommerce, blog, forum, etc)?
• How easy is it to install, administer, and update? Can you or do you know someone who can do this?
• How strong and helpful is the user community for this CMS?
• Is this CMS still updated, or is it on its way out?
• Is this CMS SEO-friendly?

This last item is very important to the success of your website. By not considering SEO-friendliness as one of the most important factors, you may end up stuck with a beautifully functioning website that no one can find.

By choosing a CMS that is SEO-friendly, you ensure that your optimizer can effectively market your website and the search engines can crawl and display it correctly.

Some of the most important CMS features include:

• Clean URLs – Session tracking or dynamic URLs make it difficult for search engines to crawl and properly link to your website. Without clean URLs, you may end up with duplicate content problems or incomplete indexation. This includes customizable URLs, so you can reference the article name instead of database ID number. URLs that look static are best.
• H1 tags – Header markup is important to split your content appropriately. Having an H1 instead of strong text at the beginning of a piece of content signals that this is the title of the content.
• Redirects – 301 redirects are essential to SEO if the content on your site might ever change (this is everyone!). If your CMS can automatically handle changes in URL structure and content with 301s, your life will be much simpler.

Not essential, but if your CMS can gracefully handle meta tags, robots.txt files, and bulk uploads, you will thank yourself later.

Content Management Systems

There are quite a few content management systems to choose from:

• WordPress
• Joomla!
• Expression Engine
• Drupal
• DotNetNuke
• Radiant
• Magento
• and many more

Each system is built to suit a different type of consumer, and most have dedicated followings.

Drupal

At Page 1 Solutions, we use Drupal as our CMS of choice. We now program all of our new designs into Drupal, and have spent many hours training the company and our clients on how to use it.

Drupal was a great choice because it is pretty SEO-friendly out of the box. With just a few additional free modules available through the community, it is highly customizable and ready for search engine optimization. The Drupal community is also very active and helpful, and have always come through for us if we had a question.

Drupal Modules for SEO

Drupal already offers clean URLs and tight, clean coding out of the box. Fellow ninja, John Donnelly and I presented at this year’s Drupal Camp Colorado, going over basics of SEO and modules we recommend for Drupal. See the video and slides for our presentation by visiting the Drupal Camp Colorado 2011 site.

The modules we recommend are:

• Nodewords/Meta Tags
• Site Verification
• XML Sitemap
• Page Title
• Global Redirect
• PathAuto
• Search 404
• Path Redirect
• Scheduler
• Service Links
• Link Checker
• Pathologic
• Robots.txt
• Google Analytics
• Boost

Your Website

As a Drupal fan-girl, I will recommend Drupal to nearly everyone. It is highly customizable and can handle the most important of websites, including the White House’s website. The community is very supportive, and folks who can help figure out Drupal problems are easy to find.

Choosing the right CMS is personal, though, and it is important that you choose the right content management system to run your website. Do not forget to consider SEO when making a selection, and choose wisely!

As an ambitious new optimizer, I was eager to try anything to improve a client’s results. I had made the mistake of taking action before doing the research many times, and have learned many hard lessons as a result.

One such lesson involved an idea regarding linking out to other very powerful sites from within an important page of my client’s site.

I was told once that links from .edu and .org sites were very powerful at determining the authority and trustworthiness of a site by search engines. My logic was “well if links from .edu’s and .org’s are very powerful, links to them should be somewhat powerful, right?” . So I proceeded to place multitudes of links to universities and associations my clients attended or were members of on their bio pages. I thought this would convey a sense of authority and qualification to the user.  What it ended up doing was weakening the accumulated link juice their bio pages had acquired by sending it out to the outside, relatively unrelated (at least by search engine algorithms) web sites. The hard lesson came when I noticed either a zero effect to a drop in the client’s results as a result of linking out to all of the .edu and .org links from their bio pages.

Below is a visual representation of what I am talking about, taken from one of SEO Moz’s Whiteboard Friday posts. They use “nofollow” links to illustrate their point. My preference would be not linking at all to the sites labeled “useless” and “boring”

Bottom line
If you are going to link from your client’s bio page to a university, or association, do so only if that person is profiled or mentioned on that specific page within that site. If they are not listed on those sites, and the client still insists, then implement a “nofollow” link to avoid passing valuable accumulated link juice.

Keywords and key phrases need to be selected much before building a website. In fact, you should think about keywords and phrases even before you choose a domain name.
It is a known fact that having a key word relevant domain name can be helpful to your website’s rankings with the Search Engines.
It is very important to name your website as close to the your targeted keywords and phrases as possible.
By choosing your keywords and phrases well in advance, you will also be able to design your site with an advantage as you can include key terms in your page URLs and ensure that the site’s architecture and navigation highlights the key phrases for your business.
Choosing target keywords and phrases in advance also enhances your competitive analysis and allows you to focus on the important points while writing your website’s content.
You can define your internal and external links and maximize the value from anchor text.

With the recent roll out of Google+ three weeks ago, there has been much talk about Google’s attempt to stomp all over Facebook and other social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter. So far the Google+ platform is available by invitation only, as they are still tweaking the system and working out the bugs.  I was able to set up a Google+ account two weeks ago and so  far I really like what I’m seeing.

Keep in mind that at this early stage, Google+ works only with Google accounts that have an active Google profile. If you haven’t created your Google profile, you will not be able to sign up for Google+. Judging from the feedback I’m seeing from other users, there are people who love what Google is doing, and then there are those who doubt Google’s ability to create a social media platform that will actually work well and catch on with the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter crowds.  After all, say the doubters, this is Google’s third attempt in the social media realm.

This time, however, I think they are on to something, and have created a powerful social media tool with a great deal of potential.  G+ integrates what I like most about the other platforms and adds a bit more.

Here are my personal Top Five Favorite Google Plus Features:

#5 – Hangouts – Hangouts is a great way to communicate face to face with anyone via video chat.  It is very easy to set up and, in my experience, works better than Facebook’s Video Chat feature. The interface looks good and is incredibly easy to use.  You only need to download a simple plug-in the first time you initiate use, and you are ready to chat!

#4 – Sparks – Sparks is a feature that enables you to find, create, and ultimately share topics of interest and use them like a news feed source for information.  Topics can be broad like the pre-set categories “movies”, “gardening” or “comics”.  You can also create targeted topics like “1950’s Horror Films”, “Growing Tomato Plants”, or “X-Men” by using the Find stuff you’re interested in… search bar.

#3 - Photos / Instant Uploads from Android – For someone like me who is always forgetting to dump the pictures out of my phone, this feature makes photo uploading unthinkably easy!  All you need is the Google+ for Android app and your photos automatically upload themselves to your G+ account immediately after they’ve been taken.  The app is much easier to use than Facebook's upload interface and the photos are quickly uploaded into a private album, by default.  You can set to share them with one or more circles when you upload or you can keep them private and share later. So simple.

#2 - Mute Posts – The Mute post option came so close to being number one on my list. It is a simple thing, but oh, so necessary.  If you have a topic on your Stream feed that no longer interests you, or a conversation that you don’t care to follow, you have the ability to get rid of it via the mute, report, or block options. Link To is also an option in the menu if the conversation is something you want to pass along to others.  Mute post is the kind way of saying "shut up" or "not now" to someone on Google+!

#1 - Circles (and Streams limited sharing capabilities) – Circl