Many years ago when I worked at a search engine optimization agency one of the most frequent challenges we faced was clients who had heard about SEO, signed on with us, then promptly shackled us with an uncooperative IT department. We'd make recommendations to our contact person in marketing, who would forward them to their IT team, who would in turn give us one of many reasons why they couldn't be implemented.

Again, this was several years ago - since then most IT departments are onboard as they and the marketing departments both realize the value of working together in the name of search engine optimization.

But what happens when it’s not the IT department who is fully responsible for uploading all of the content on the Web site? Web content management systems (web cms)are quite popular these days because they allow for much quicker turnaround time for creating and uploading content to a Web site. Ease of use is one of the main attractions of a Web CMS - simple enough to use so that marketers can bypass the IT department when they need to make a change to their site. But as the old movie superhero once said, “With great power comes great responsibility”.

In speaking with more recent clients who happen to be using a Web CMS, here are a few SEO issues I have noticed:

• Template based system: If there is quirky code on one page, chances are it’s the same for ALL pages.


• Limitations to “behind the scenes” aspects of a page that are crucial to SEO:

o Can’t create custom title tags
o Can’t create custom META data

• Architectural quirks:

o Can’t name page/file what you actually want to name it
o Being a template, the main site navigation is “boiler plated” and can’t be customized

Of course these are all pretty top level issues, however, it really drives home the fact that proper SEO is both an art (marketing team) and a science (IT team), and both sides must be on the same page (pun intended) in order for the Web site to ultimately succeed.

It is also important to keep in mind that SEO friendly Web CMSs do exist. In fact, Lyris’ own Hot Banana was designed with many of these issues in mind to help marketers build and manage SEO friendly Web sites.

For tips on how to leverage all aspects of your Web CMS to build an SEO friendly Web site that can present your content and keywords to the search engines correctly through the site's infrastructure, refer to these articles here on www.lyrishq.com:

• Guide To Leveraging Your Web CMS for SEO
• Secrets of Keyword Phrase Optimization

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About the Author

Andres Galdames is a business analyst at Lyris. He is an expert in integrated online marketing and pay-per-click campaigns.

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