Making your CMS site SEF

In case you have no clue what those acronyms mean, CMS stands for "content management system". These are generally free, server side platforms used to publish content on the Web. They are becoming very popular tools with which to generate websites ranging from personal blogs to industry portals.

Popular platforms include Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, Wordpress, Custom CMS, Plone, Scoop, Community Server, and the list goes on. And you might have noticed, several of these you may know as popular blog platforms. Thats because most of the top blog platforms are indeed specialized CMS platforms that happened to be tweaked for optimal use as blogs. However, most, if not all, can be used to create more a less a "standard" (non-blog style) website, or a blog, or a combination of both.

SEF stands for "search engine friendly", and it is a term used often in discussions about dynamically generated websites that use server side programing lanuguages like PHP or ASP, as many CMS and blog platforms do. By default, dynamic sites are not search engine friendly (SEF.) Going into the reasons for that would require another post or article, but briefly, it is because search engine spiders prefer to read static HTML pages when they scour the web to index data on websites.

Although many spiders and bots can read dynamic pages, often the time it takes to parse this data, and therefore to index the page, is greater than is the case with static HTML. Thus, from an optimization standpoint, it is important to faciliate the translation of dynamically generated server side pages such that they produce a static HTML output that can be easily read by spiders.

For example, a website created in a CMS based on the PHP language might have a home page like "www.examplesite.com/index.php" by default. However, most good CMS systems have a built in "SEF" feature (known variously as SEF urls, clean urls, etc.) and at very least offer 3rd party plug ins, which in effect translate an "...index.php" page in the example above, to a static version like "...index.html" for all web pages and blog posts on the site.

So, whether you're a casual blogger or oversee a large authority site created with a powerful CMS, if you are seeking maximum exposure from the major search engines, and want to make it as *easy as possible* for your site to be spidered, parsed, indexed, and ranked, you need to pay attention to the issue of SEF urls on your site. I have a series of posts planned for the upcoming weeks for a case study that examines how to create a fully optimized website using the Joomla and or Drupal CMS platform. I'll cover SEF urls in addition to many other considerations, adjustments, and tweaks intended to get the greatest SEO milage out of a CMS based website. Stay tuned...