Which open source content management system is best for SEO?

It doesn’t take long for the average website owner to want to move away from a static HTML site to something that allows more functionality and complexity. Indeed today, most new webmasters would even start with a content management system straight out of the gate. Static HTML pages are great for simple brochure-ware type sites, but as soon as you want to add in any sort of interactivity (forms, commenting, rankings… the list goes on) to your site, you really need to move away from static HTML web site.

Of course it’s entirely possible to build your own content management system from scratch, if you’re an experienced coder, or if you are willing to pay for one. That can get expensive, fast, and for 95% of web site owners, there are a ton of content management systems which can provide the necessary functionality at a fraction of the cost.

One of the boons of the explosion of the internet is the proliferation of open source software. While there are some pretty heavy hitting commercial (proprietary) content management systems available, they range from reasonably cheap to hideously expensive. And for the average small business web site owner, the majority of them offer no extra functionality that can’t be found in a totally free open source system.

The broad subject of content management systems could fill hundreds of books, websites and forums, indeed those books have been written, and the web is a ever expanding repository of content on the matter. And that won’t be stopping any time soon. So instead I’ll take a look at which systems have the most use as both a publishing tool *and* some of their SEO benefits and downfalls. The caveat is that I’ll only be looking at open source systems which I have at least some familiarity with, after all there are so many that it would be impossible for me to give a fair & balanced analysis of every single CMS out there. I also point out that I’m not the world’s biggest guru with any of these content management systems, but merely stating my own *personal* experiences with them and how they’ve worked in the search engine optimization arena.

Before I get going, I’ll point out I have a heavy open source bent, therefore you won’t see me looking at Windows only systems, in fact 95% of my work with content management systems has either been on a Linux distribution or a BSD variant. That doesn’t mean you can’t run these systems on a Windows platform, but to be honest you will always have the best results running them on a Linux/BSD server. Not only will you find they run at lot better, but as you delve deeper into their functionality you will find that adding the required libraries will be a lot easier (and cheaper!) under an OSS platform.

The content management systems I’m going to look at are Joomla, WordPress, Drupal and CMS Made Simple. All four are based around the typical LAMP stack: Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL. The vast majority of web hosts will accommodate this sort of platform, so compatibility (at least at the most basic level) shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve used all of these systems for a variety of websites, some commercial, some personal, some for my own in house projects and some for clients. The type of sites I’ve worked on has ranged from small business websites, to more complex eCommerce sites. Obviously each CMS has their strengths and weaknesses in many areas (technical, usability, flexibility etc), but for the purpose of this examination I’m predominantly going to look at how they fair at search engine optimization.

So, my next posts will cover the following content management systems:

• Joomla
• WordPress
• Drupal
• CMS Made Simple

Stay tuned!