Content Management System: Selection, SEO Base and Typical Limitations
What a CMS does, what is important for SEO and editorial staff and which system boundaries become relevant in practice.
The topic often decides whether content is only available or actually meets the search intention. Usually, the biggest lever lies in better tailoring, clearer utility and less in mere amount of text.
What a CMS does, what is important for SEO and editorial staff and which system boundaries become relevant in practice. This wiki page arranges the topic practically and shows, When priority arises, which mistakes are often and how you derive concrete measures from them.
Example: A template error affects a hundred pages
After a CMS update, the article template generates two title elements. A hundred individual corrections in the content would be the wrong approach: Compare source text and template assignment of an affected page as well as an inconspicuous page. Then, check the common layout or extension configuration.
Acceptance includes several page types and language versions. A CMS change is not an automatic SEO improvement; crucial are, among other things, output, URL stability, editorial operation and permanent possible maintenance.
Background of the CMS
In the first years of the publicly accessible Internet (approximately until 2003), content could only be implemented into a website with great effort and programming knowledge. However, there was always a need on the part of the webmasters to be able to do this process very easily. Therefore, content management systems were created, which today enable even people with average knowledge to put different types of content on a website, to remove it or to edit it.
It can be text, pictures, videos and graphics. The authors only need the corresponding access rights, which can be administered in every content management system. The data storage is media-neutral in a CMS. The content can therefore be retrieved, for example, as an HTML document or as a PDF document. A fully dynamic content management system only generates the necessary format at user request.
It stores the content in a relational database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, there are even more possibilities. Some very complex enterprise CMS dispense with the classic database, and there are also flat-file CMS with content storage in files.
Which content management systems are most common?
There are some proprietary solutions that have been developed for special applications. But the most common are open source systems, which are therefore freely accessible. The most important are:
- WordPress (percentage of all websites estimated 40%)
- Joomla
- TYPO3 (Enterprise CMS)
- Drupal
- Shopify
There are many more such systems, all of which have their own advantages and sometimes small disadvantages, and are particularly suitable for certain applications. WordPress is the undisputed market leader.
CMS: Essential functions
The range of functions of content management systems can sometimes be considerable. Essentially, however, the following functions must be ensured:
- Easy setting, editing and deletion of content even by people without programming skills
- Administration, i.e. the ability to make the system accessible to different users at different levels and in different areas (user A may set everything + edit + delete, user B may set everything + edit + delete only in a certain category, user C may only set + edit but not delete, etc.)
- Automatic sending of messages to responsible persons in the event of a change in content
- Managing different versions
- Ordering of contents according to semantic criteria
- Storage of content in a database (except for exceptions, see above)
- Import and export of content from/to other databases
- Ability to store and manage very large amounts of data
- Responsive web design
- Webreporting
- Content Targeting for Information Personalization
- Multilingualism
The responsive web design (website recognizes the device and opens to it) is very important in that the content must finally appear on a wide variety of devices. In 2021, there are still websites with older content management systems or older versions of common systems as mentioned above, which require a switch to the mobile or stationary version depending on the end device.
This is considered completely obsolete for new websites, but these older versions may be preserved for a long time. They sometimes process vast amounts of data and have hundreds of thousands to millions of accesses every day, so that those responsible shy away from the relaunch.
Presentation requirements for a CM system
The CM system should display the contents accessible on all devices independently of the browser or operating system. In addition to text and graphics, this also applies to multimedia content. Because of the display on mobile devices with a touchscreen, all buttons must be designed in such a way that they can be operated by clicking the mouse or tapping the finger, which is a self-evident requirement in responsive web design.
A useful feature is if a CM system can integrate external data sources such as maps, calendars and user data via an API. When content lifecycle management is integrated, this allows for time-limited presentation of content and subsequent archiving. Another very useful feature, which unfortunately does not include every content management system, is an integrated search engine for internal search on the website in question.