SEO friendly CMS is the friend who always has the right seats for the concert.
Even if you already have a way to get into the SERPs, choosing a solution with built-in SEO features increases your chances of landing in the top spots. And so be ready to be in front of the stage, to attract the attention of your star prospects!
However, which one to choose from among all the platforms in the market? Which CMS Boosts Your SEO? We bring you the answers in this article…
Things to keep in mind while choosing an SEO Friendly CMS
Your CMS is the bridge between search engines and your content. In other words, it must be solid! A CMS without the necessary SEO features can hinder the discovery of your pages by search engines (and therefore by your prospects).
Before choosing a solution, here are the elements that an SEO friendly CMS should fully include:
an intuitive user interface
A user-friendly interface is vital to the user experience. Think about it, Your team will need to use a CMS almost every day, They will need an ergonomic tool, which requires very little technical know-how or training.
It aims to be able to easily integrate all the best SEO practices on a daily basis, while facilitating the creation of traffic to your website.
For this, choose a system that allows your developers to code in their preferred programming language, or opt for a turnkey solution if your colleagues don’t have HTML knowledge.
Scalability of SEO CMS
Google and its algorithms… That’s enough of a story! For decades, the Mountain View firm has been developing its own artificial intelligence to improve the quality and relevance of its results.
Website managers must constantly adapt to new regulations. So, you can also choose a flexible CMS, which will allow you to follow SEO trends.
Also, you have to prepare for new formats. Today you have to think about Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Smart Speaker. Be sure to choose a CMS solution that can support these emerging channels.
Synchronization with your third-party applications
Who says CMS SEO, a tool that is able to be easily integrated into your marketing applications! Your marketing automation platform, your emailing tool, your business intelligence solution, Google Analytics, your CRM… For effective SEO, you need to interconnect your various applications.
Choose a CMS that either has extensions or powerful APIs that allow synchronization and connection to all your tools.
On-Page SEO Features
On-page SEO allows you to control the content of your page and structure it to optimize the way it appears in results. When these elements are not clearly defined, search engines fill in the blanks. And it’s not always very relevant!
Natively or via plugins, ensure that the selected CMS offers the possibility to:
- Edit title and metadata.
- Customize title tag.
- Optimize Image and Media SEO.
- Create your own URLs.
- Manage redirects.
Website crawling and indexing management
Your website probably has pages that you don’t want to appear in search results. These past events can be landing pages or internal resources. An SEO friendly CMS should give you the power to control what is available for crawling and indexing.
Before choosing your tool, look for options such as:
- Automatic creation of sitemaps.
- A Noindex directive for pages.
- Canonical tag for duplicate content control.
- Control of 301 redirects and other status codes.
Like on-page SEO criteria, these features can be native or added through an extension.
schema markup support
Schema markup, known as “structured data”, is a piece of code placed on a web page to summarize the main points of content. These additional tags help search engines understand the topic better. With this structured data, your content is eligible for Featured Snippets or Google Position 0, which improves your visibility and click-through rate.
An SEO friendly CMS facilitates the implementation of schema markup. However, also remember to check that it provides this functionality on each page and that the code is correctly placed in the head tag, especially when the data is automatically populated.
An analytical tool… or the possibility of integrating your own
CMSs provide built-in analytics tools that allow you to regularly measure the performance of your SEO efforts. The most complete platform will allow you to follow:
- organic traffic.
- Keyword display.
- page display.
- Lead.
- bounce rate.
- Inbound Link.
- Duplicate Content.
Alternatively, you should be able to install your favorite analytics tools as additional plugins.
fast page loading
You definitely know this: the speed of your pages affects your position in search engines. A CMS with poorly written code or optimized images can slow down the loading of your content and therefore affect your ranking.
Make sure that the chosen solution allows you to take measures to reduce performance processes and manage your site speed well.
navigation optimization
The more you can personalize your website, the more opportunities you have to optimize the experience of your visitors. However, the duration of the visit, as well as the number of pages visited, affect your SEO. These criteria, which are part of Google’s famous core web vitals, are essential to put you in poll position.
Same goes for watching on mobile! An SEO friendly CMS perfectly suited for smartphones and helps you optimize navigation on small screens.
6 SEO Friendly CMSs To Find
Now that you know what you’re looking for, here are 6 SEO-friendly CMSs:
1. Magento, a powerful CMS
Let’s start with one of the most powerful CMS on the market: Magento. Used by huge companies such as Nike, Christian Louboutin, Coca-Cola, Jaguar, Zadig & Voltaire, Burger King, Pierre Fabre and SEAT, this open-source solution is 100% customizable, flexible and scalable. Everything you need to improve your natural context and get ranked in search engines quickly.
Among the strong features of this Pro SEO CMS, you will find:
- Easy addition of meta-descriptions to all your product pages.
- Optional text customization of product images.
- Automatic creation of a well-structured (but editable) sitemap.
- Customizable navigation menu for effective on-page SEO and better customer experience.
- Creating authentic URLs to avoid duplicate content.
- Automatic filling of structured data.
- Full and detailed configuration of your order, account, shopping cart and administration pages (with the possibility to switch them to “nofollow”).
- Ability to create carousels of product recommendations and other content designed to retain visitors (an important SEO factor).
- Automatic addition of SSL certificates for pages containing personal data and sensitive information.
2. Joomla, SEO Friendly CMS for Everyone
Joomla is one of the most popular CMS for its performance in terms of speed and user experience. Without needing to install extensions, you can:
- Write meta description and title.
- Enable gzip compression.
- Change how your URLs are generated.
- Structure your content for Google Snippets.
- Create XML Sitemap.
- Set up redirects.
- Stack the pages on your site to improve performance.
- Specify canonical URLs to help search engines locate the most relevant version of a page.
Joomla is a benchmark SEO friendly CMS!
3. Shopify, a Turnkey CMS to Get Started
A turnkey platform for beginners, Shopify is aimed at professionals who want to launch e-commerce with a few products. In terms of SEO features, this CMS allows you to:
- target keyword.
- Add alternative text to media.
- Optimize the structure of your website.
- Create redirects and XML sitemaps.
- Manage authentic URLs.
Additionally, Shopify has partnered with CDN provider Cloudflare to improve page load times. And if you want to go beyond the basic SEO options, you have tons of plugins to help you improve your sitemap, fix bugs, strengthen structured data, optimize local SEO, and more.
4. Drupal, SEO CMS for Experts
If you have coding experience, Drupal is the SEO CMS for you! Especially since it is fully customizable, allowing you to customize all elements of the core web vitals and structure it according to your keyword strategy.
Another advantage of Drupal: the loading speed of your pages! All elements are automatically cached, which improves the display time of the content.
Lastly, this CMS provides several extensions to customize your natural context and:
- Set up an analysis report of your situation.
- Add rich data to your content.
- Customize your URLs.
- Manage redirects.
- Create a fully structured sitemap.
- Optimize image and media context.
5. WordPress, the famous CMS
WordPress remains the most popular CMS in the market today. Whether you have a blog, a showcase site or an e-commerce, this solution is completely SEO friendly.
Basically, WordPress has several options for this:
- Edit your URL.
- Generate XML Sitemap.
- Increase page loading speed.
- Minimize images.
- Generate analysis report on your SEO strategy.
- Create one or more sitemaps in one click.
- Improve the readability of your content.
- Optimize robot.txt and more generally all site files.
But it is possible to add plugins to go further! For support, call a freelance WordPress developer at Codeur.com!
6. Prestashop, French SEO CMS
Exclusively dedicated to e-commerce sites, Prestashop is a 100% French SEO friendly CMS.
If it is possible to configure your basic SEO elements directly through the interface, then you can proceed with plugins like SEO Manager.
The latter allows you to automatically generate metadata for product, supplier, brand and category pages. It also inserts your keywords into common tags. A real time saver for those who manage an online store with hundreds of references.
Our Tips for Choosing the Best SEO CMS
Choosing an SEO friendly CMS is not enough to improve your SEO. Once the technical side is in place, think about your content strategy as well, from its creation to its delivery, to ensure optimal visibility.
If you need support setting up a CMS or with your SEO strategy, call a freelance CMS developer by posting your ad on Codeur.com!