Saturday, August 28, 2010

CMS- An Enemy of SEO

The purpose of every business website, whether directly or indirectly, is to find new customers. This is best achieved when the client’s website has high ranking in the organic, or natural, search engine results. This is achieved through Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO. The majority of website development companies are obsessed with development technologies and do not understand SEO. As a result website developers often sell clients on Content Management Systems, commonly known as CMS. This is an Internet marketing mistake because CMS is an enemy of SEO.

Why do clients buy into CMS? CMS is an easy sell to many clients because they demand having control of their website. This is like giving a teenager the keys to a sports car – the result is going to be ugly. These clients are obsessed with saving money that they would pay a web company to make content changes. In reality this control results in losing money through missed sales opportunities. Additionally, these clients are unintentionally sending these sales opportunities to their competitors. This defeats any logical reason for having a business website.

Why do website developers promote CMS? At best they simply don’t know better. In all probability it’s because implementing CMS means more money in their development contract and they are so techie oriented that they love to add “geek features”. Remember that website developers are just that, website developers. They are not marketing or sales professionals – certainly not SEO experts. And this goes for those in-house IT people. Don’t get them involved in your website design or development.

Why is CMS an enemy of SEO? SEO is a very complicated process requiring technical knowledge to optimize coding, marketing skills to develop optimized content and overall a sound understanding of how to combine the two elements in a white hat fashion. Knowing that a significant part of the SEO process is in creating optimized content it is obvious why CMS is problematic. It is the vehicle through which a client has the ability to wreck SEO. Clients wanting good Search Engine Optimization results need to give the keys to an SEO professional.

Chances are that spending a few hundred dollars a year for an Internet marketing firm to update your website is completely acceptable when you understand that your new sales will pay for the services. This is a simple cost of doing business for the purpose of having a business website to find new customers. On the other hand you could be obsessed with control, save a few hundred dollars a year in website maintenance expenses, and cost your company thousands of dollars in sales by employing CMS - an enemy of SEO.

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