What is CMS?
Short for content management system, a CMS is a piece of software that helps you create and manage content for your website using a human-friendly interface, rather than needing to work directly with the code. Basically, a CMS makes managing a website much easier for people of all technical levels. Via that human-friendly interface, a CMS takes your inputs and turns them into a functioning website for your visitors.
6 Reasons to Use CMS
Using a content management system as your website platforms offers a variety of benefits that are all game-changers. Content management systems store all of your web content in one place, support effortless collaboration, assist in creating dynamic web pages, allow for quick and easy updates to be made, and offer handy plugins and tools to make your site as effective and secure as possible, while also saving you both time and money.
No Web Programming Experience? No Problem!
Content management systems, like WordPress, were built for users with little to no programming experience. Once your website is fully developed by a web design professional, managing the actual content on your website is simple and easy to learn.
Your web content, like images and text, can easily be inserted and uploaded onto specific pages, and styled in a content editor that is similar to Microsoft Word.
Easy Collaboration and Access
Content management systems allow multiple people to not only have access to your website, but also easily collaborate on different projects. Using individual accounts, multiple people can add, edit, or update content on the site right from their own computers or devices. CMS’ also store all of your online content for you in one place and is available to anyone with access to the website, meaning the need to send multiple different files to different individuals is no longer necessary.
Better yet, content management systems are also very convenient for people on-the-go. You can login to the back-end of your website from anywhere. All you need is a computer, tablet, or mobile device and an internet connection.
Advanced SEO Tools and Plugins
Content management systems offer a number of plugins and tools that can help your site rank better in major search engines. This doesn’t mean you should get rid of your online marketing team, but these tools can help implement a basic SEO strategy in an attempt to increase online traffic to your site.
Other website options, like WYSIWYG editors, do not have tools and plugins available to specifically help optimize your web content for major search engines. WordPress plugins directly present options within the interface itself to include web page titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, and all the other elements needed to best optimize your website for Google and other major search engines. They will also alert you when these elements are not done correctly.
What’s more, these plugins are regularly updated to adapt to any changes in major search engines that could affect your ranking. So, your website will remain optimized at all times, despite any updates or changes. Basically, CMSs, especially WordPress, are the only website options that allow you to easily optimize your website for search engines using user-friendly plugins and tools right within the editing interface itself.
Security
In today’s world, the last thing anybody wants is for their website to be hacked, especially ecommerce website owners. Websites can be especially vulnerable, and are often targeted by hackers, to steal personal information.
However, content management systems are consistently tested by an army of developers and computer scientists in an effort to protect users against any and all potential security threats. Additionally, there are countless plugins and tools available that are also individually designed to increase your website’s security.
Cost Effective and Affordable
Website maintenance can be a major expense if you have a static website. Calling a web designer or developer to make frequent changes can add up. Not only is cost a factor, but you will most likely have to wait a few days to see the updates live on your site.
Investing in a content management system can save you both time and money. With a content management system in place, you no longer have to rely on a web developer to make common site changes. You can instantly make these changes yourself exactly when you need them done.
Instant Site Maintenance
Without a CMS, making changes to your site can be both time consuming and expensive. However, maintaining your site has never been easier nor quicker with CMS’.
Content management systems allow you to upload or alter content with a few simple clicks of a button, rather than individually digging through pages of code to make an adjustment. Furthermore, general updates and other support requirements that maintain the well-being of your site can be conducted almost instantly, with another few clicks of a button.
This ease of maintenance is no exception for the design elements of a website too. Content management systems allow for the visual components of a website to be altered with minimal to no coding. The best part is, all this can happen instantly from any device with any internet connection.
Why WordPress is the Best CMS Platform
WordPress The CMS everyone has heard of – REASONS TO BUY
- Loads of tools
- Great selection of themes
- Affordably priced business plan
If there’s one CMS most people have heard of, it’s WordPress. The platform was launched in 2003 and has become a major part of the internet since. Based on PHP and MySQL, it provides you with tools to create a feature-packed website or blog using written content, videos, images and more.
You also have the ability to install a mixture of pre-made and third-party themes to personalize your website. They cater for all sorts of industries, from retail to hospitality. Although you can download the software for free from WordPress.org and install it on your server, there’s also the option to get a domain and hosting with WordPress. In addition, you have WordPress native apps at your disposal and since recently Block Editor is now supported on mobile devices.
The business plan costs $25 a month (around £19, AU$34) and gives you full access to the theme store, unlimited storage space and a custom domain. That’s not a bad investment if you want to create a website and maintain it going forward.
CMS features and SEO
It is generally believed that Google uses over 200 ranking factors. Well, most of the factors that have to do with a website’s technical performance and on-page HTML elements are CMS-related. Google should be able to easily crawl your website’s pages, understand what they are about and link them to relative keywords. Therefore, proper HTML markup is an absolute must.
Besides, there are many more CMS features that matter for SEO. Some of them are crucial while others are just nice to have.
Page elements you should be able to set up
Let’s start with page elements you deal with every time you create a new page. Those are page URL, title tag and meta description, image alt tags and headings. Using them properly is essential to get a page to rank well in search. And here’s why:
- URLs tell search engines and users what a page is about, so for SEO it’s better to have sleek, human-readable URLs;
- Title tags and meta descriptions are what users see in SERP and further decide if a website is worth a clickthrough;
- If the image fails to load, users would see an image ALT tag. Google also uses ALT tags to make sense out of a picture and promote it in the image search. In addition, screen readers that visually impaired people use also rely on ALT tags;
- Headings help both users and Google scan through the text.
With an SEO-friendly CMS, you should be able to easily add and/or edit all the above-mentioned elements. A good CMS would also prompt you to adjust meta tag length or add more headings.
Technical issues to get under control
Now, let’s go into the technical details that impact your rankings.
PAGE SPEED
Without any hesitation, I can put page speed at the top of the list. A slow-loading website will affect your rankings, and your CMS may be the one to blame. A well-written code and optimized images are your best friends here, while bloated code is to be avoided at all costs. As of 2018, the speed ranking factor also applies to mobile search.
MOBILE OPTIMIZATION
While you are preparing your website for the Google Search updates, make sure that your content is also optimized for mobile. Google has been encouraging webmasters to optimize their websites for mobile for years. Now, as mobile search is steadily growing and mobile-first indexing is in full swing, you have no other way but to optimize.
The mobile-first indexing update is scheduled for March 2021.
DUPLICATE PAGES
Another thing to worry about is duplicate content. If several URLs of your website lead to pages that look identical or very similar, it’s just a minor concern. If you have many URLs of the sort, you can get hit by the Panda algorithm. To make it right, a CMS should allow you to mark the original URL with a “canonical” tag. That way, search engines will know which URL to rank and which to leave out of the index.
SETTING UP REDIRECTS
Sometimes, there is no need to keep a duplicate and it can be simply removed. In this case, you’ll have to use the 301 redirect. Setting up redirects is easy with some CMSs and it’s more complicated with others.
ROBOTS.TXT FILE AND XML SITEMAP
Finally, you can actually nip the problem of duplicate content in the bud. Just don’t let search engine index duplicates in the first place by blocking URLs for web crawlers via a robots.txt file. This is where you hide from search engines all the pages that need to be hidden, not just duplicate ones. A good CMS will let you easily generate and fine-tune a robots.txt file along with an XML sitemap. The latter helps Google find all the pages that need to be found.
Ok, this is it for our CMS SEO checklist. It is not exhaustive, but everything that really matters is in there. Other features are just nice to have.
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