Search Engine friendly CMS

[grasko]

Hello
Can anyone recommend a search engine friendly cms system..?..

Thanks

[JMac]

Hi there,

Like everyone else, I'm sure, I check every once in a while on Google to see my clients' sites' rankings. (That's a mouthful!!) Usually, there is one specific site with which I compete on certain search terms. They always have more than one individual result returned because it will look like this:

Title
description
www.theirdomain.com

Title
description (most often the same description as above)
webonthefly.com/theirdomain_name/page_name blah blah

Finally, I became curious about who this "webonthefly" was...
(I imagined some big brother type of "fly on the wall" rather than what they really are:
They are a small business content management system.

While I can't vouch for anything else about them, I CAN say without a doubt that they are search engine friendly... much to my client's chagrin.

I wonder though... does this make their web content management system similar to "doorway pages" which have you penalized on search engines... eventually?

Any ideas on that part anyone?

Good luck!

JMac

[cyanide]

well, you could try www.postnuke.com

someone developed a module/theme that converts url strings to search engine friendly pages.

Seems to work pretty good.

[tomED]

Typo3 with a few tweaks can provide search engine friendly urls!

Tom

www.2bscene.net

[paco]

You can use any cms if you are willing to play around with the mod_rewrite module for Apache (or program an ISAPI filter for IIS). I found some great help here : http://spider-food.net/dynamic-page-optimization.html . But I also found out that Google does index dynamic URLs if there is less than 3 parameters in it. The only thing to keep in mind is that all those pages must be called using a proper <a href=... tag or else it won't get to those pages.

paco

[grasko]

Thanks all for your feedback.
I'll check out the article on spider-food.net :-)

[PXJ]

I have done a lot of research on the issue of PHP CMS's and bulletin board systems and search engine friendly URLs.

My final conclusion:

The best all around solution is PostNuke + AutoTheme along with XForum module or PNPHPBB2 module. I use this system as often as possible. The whole shebang is free and the most versatile CMS System available.

Reasons:

1. The short URL syntax is the shortest and friendliest.
2. PostNuke has a huge community for support.
3. There are other addons for SEO optimization
4. BB scripts that use short URLs are very rare
5. Autotheme is the only CMS themeing system I know of that allows you to edit your CMS in any HTML editor

The list goes on...

The AutoTheme solution applies to PHP-Nuke and MDPro but I think PostNuke is far superior.

[PXJ]

I have to say though, the site in my sig was in the top ten for my Google keywords/phrases for months up until a few days ago. It uses PostNuke + AutoTheme.

This is not related to what I wrote above. Somehow I got penalized or lost in the shuffle at Google.

I have to figure out why.

[nakulgoyal]

I also feel that is the best option. To use mod_rewrite and do the stuff. Works really well till date.

[kingdonk]

Try Mambo Open Source at www.mamboserver.com
It has built in SEF and is a great CMS system i have tried, and i have tried 7 including commercial ones, and postnuke.
It offers SEF and each page, and or content can have its own meta tags and keywords.
At www.mamboportal.com is a large community with free templates, components and modules.
The forums offer great help for any questions and the software is easy to edit.
There is a commercial version for the SEF that makes the URL reflect the content or page that it is linked to, but the standard one is great.

[hjuan99]

Drupal is a php CMS that has search engine friendly urls. I haven't used it yet, but am about to try it on a commercial site. I've heard really good things about it.

http://www.drupal.org

I am currently trying the apache mod-rewrite solution with two postnuke sites. I've only heard/read good things about it.

[baldur]

I concur with some posters here - PostNuke is in my opinion one of the best. I run several sites with PostNuke.
I have in the past used, PHP-Nuke, PHPwebsite and EnVolution - the latter being awful.
Post Nuke has proved to be stable and reliable. I have never had any issues with search engine positioning and the sites that are promoted, rank very well. The best feature from my point of view is the dynamic keywords that you can opt to use, which has proven to be a real boon.

[alias420]

Drupal is what I use on one of my sites after testing pretty much all of them. It's control panel takes a little getting used to but once you understand their way of thinking it works really well. It also has a built in mod_rewrite funtionality so you dont have to patch it with googletap or anything it's done for you.

[jgoddard]

The CMS I've worked on and the one I'm currently developing just writes the files to the server. Any CMS that uses pages.asp?id=23423 is just bad programming...

[contensis]

I work for a company called Contensis and have developed a content management system with meta data management and SE optimization. This combined with the ability to set up multiple servers and send the content as flat html or aspx files through FTP means that all pages are search engine friendly.

We also offer a design service which includes setting up templates and meta data that will automatically publish pages from any data-source including databases, xml, form input, email, sms, and data from existing systems etc.. This data can be formatted in such a way as to positively encourage search engines to index the site. The methods we use include using keywords in all the places search engines look. We also take care of internal searching through managed meta data and can conform to standards in public as well as government organizations in most countries. You can supply a meta data standard and we can create a managed map within the CMS that will ensure conformity.

If you would like more info then please email j.latham@genetics.uk.com or visit www.ContentManagement.co.uk

[HardCoded]

The hands-down simplest one I have ever used was Typo3, mentioned above by TomEd. After I installed it, I told it I wanted to use SEF URLs and it wrote out a little .htaccess file for me and changed all its links accordingly. I like it when stuff does work for me.

Plus it's XHTML compliant, which I like. (Doesn't HTML with big ugly capitalized tag names look ugly now?)

Some day I'll actually add some content to that thing.

[gRF]

I tried few different CMSs, and so far, in terms of search-engine 'friendliness', only few are good:
- typo3
- phpwcms
- mambo
- sitellite

All of them are 'mature' products, some easier to install and tweak then others. What I don't like about them is that look on the faces (like: "How many books I should read so I can finally use this??") of my clients and all non-tech people who acyually suppose to use them. But that's the storry for some other thread, I guess...

[tblighe]

We thought about this a lot when we designed the 123Live CMS. Regular CMSs normally use querystrings (the bit after the ? in the URL), and Google definitely does not like these. So regular CMS sites don't get indexed unless they are viewed by Google as worthy (few are).

123Live publishes the site as regular HTML pages so there is no problem with search engines indexing the content.

[michelle189]

Recently my company bought a Vezine content management license and I can say, it has been performing really beautiful and fast. I got the hang of it quickly. I as a designer is more than willing to work as a freelance for any website which uses Vezine.

Search engine friendly are no big deal for Vezine :)

[ryan4jeep]

Our company has been activly involved in creating an amazing product called EMCON(electronic marketing console)
Galaxy Interactive Inc.'s EMCON(Electronic Marketing Console) makes building profitable web sites easy. This amazing new software allows you to create massive websites easily with no extra costs and with no HTML or coding skills whatsoever. This time saving software makes you the webmaster and allows you to make changes to your web presence instantly without waiting or paying costly webmaster fees. At the same time packing the top web marketing techniques into a comprehensive easy to manage format all run by you from one place. EMCON (Electronic Marketing Console) has changed the way we do business online! Its a Content management system first then We built into it a link trade management software, An email marketing and autoresponse system, stats tracking , Search engine submission guidlines section, Keyword research tools, keyword density tools, Search engine optimization wizards as you build it teaches you to optimize for search engines,Forums, online web mail, a resources center, and everything can be accessed from any computer in the world with an internet conection. I encourage you to have a look at it because it is search engine friendly. We have been optimizing web sites for years and are very successfull at it. I have only seen a few search engine friendly cms and they certainly dont use the marketing console aproach that makes managing and marketing any online business easy even for non technical people. We have been selling licenses to webmasters who use it to add value to there clients websites and it allows webmasters to build sites 15 times faster than building from scratch. So less time spent equels higher profit margins. Have a look I am curiouse what you think of it.

[twinturbo]

I have recently purchased the EMCON CMS and I am having a great time building web sites.I am new to web sites building and I find the EMCON very easy to learn and use.I plan on building more and I have purchased an EMCON package.I encourage anyone interested in a CMS to look at the EMCON.

[arpecop]

PHPWCMS is very powerfull cms ... and too complicated .. almost perfect ... but phpwcms have not friendy SE urls they are like - =1,0,1,1 there is a mod that can made it looks like 1.1.1.1 etc. but it's too hard to made it

sorry for bad english

[DaButcher]

My new CMS (100% custom made by yours truly) is search-engine-friendly!

I parse the title of the page in the querystring, like:
/?google=Informasjon&mnu=2
or:
/?google=Informasjon%20om%20kunstner&mnu=2&submnu=6

The ?google variable is not used by the CMS, it's only parsed for google to crawl. It's always in the beginning of the querystring, as that gets a higher ranking than the end of the querystring.

The CMS also parses title tags for <a href>, alt tags for <img />, etc. It's all done automagically by my genious CMS :)

Still in beta, and not open source!

The CMS also parses XHTML compliant code and has a lot of nifty functions.

[nakulgoyal]

The crux I feel is any CMS that is modded with mod_rewrite or ISAPI Rewrite to get search engine friendly URL rewriting, and is easy to use and customize for design is the best :)