Custom Content Management, More Trouble Than Value

A long time ago, on the internet, most web pages were hard-coded by developers. Over time, webmasters and developers began to recognize that there must be a better way to create, organize, update, and remove web pages without having to edit HTML files. Along came the concept of the content management system.

At first, these content management systems were very basic and not more more user-friendly than editing the hard-coded pages. Some developers began creating proprietary CMS solutions. Users would basically rent (license) the software for use on their sites.

Today, there are a variety of CMS solutions from which to choose. Even better, many are released under open-source and general use licenses. Not only are these CMS platforms free, they're constantly updated by a large community of very talented developers.

Unfortunately, some CMS platforms don't follow best search engine optimization practices out of the box. However, most mainstream open-source general use platforms are moving in the direction of 100% search engine-friendliness. And some that don't have easy fixes through the use of various plugins.

Nonetheless, there are still many custom content management systems out there on the world wide web. While some of these provide additional value over the ready-to-use general use platforms, in my experience, most aren't worth the problems they create in terms of search engine optimization.

I've worked with a handful of clients who have custom content management systems that create big search problems. Two of the most common are the lack of semantic information in URL and page/post titles.

This is a huge problem as these are two key signals to search as to what a web is about.

If you're using a custom CMS and you're not sure whether or not it's search engine-friendly, you should check for some of these basic issues:

• URLs - Do you URLs contain keywords related to the content on your pages or do they look bizarre containing strange special characters?
• Page Titles - When you create new page or post on your site does it create an HTML title tag that reflects the page title?
• Headings - When you create a new page does your CMS create an H1 tag that reflects your page/post title?

If your URLs, page titles, and headers don't accurately describe what your pages are about, it's likely that you are creating some serious problems for your site's visibility within search engines.