The Best CMS for SEO: Which One to Choose

If you have a business and are making the leap into the digital world, you must be clear about some vital factors to position your website in search engines and thus reach the largest possible number of potential customers.

Having an optimal content manager is one of them since it will allow you to control everything that is published on the website, facilitating the work of the search engine. For this reason, at Dobuss we are going to help you choose the best CMS for SEO adapted to your project, whether it is an e-commerce or a corporate website.

The importance of choosing the best CMS to position your website

Before going into detail about the characteristics that a CMS must have in order to work with any SEO strategy successfully, you should know what a content manager is.

The CMS (Content Management System) or content management system, is a tool that allows you to easily create and modify all the contents of a web page, as well as its design without the need for advanced programming knowledge. It has a control panel from which one or several users can work on the basic pillars of the site, such as the appearance of the texts, the optimized images or videos, the structure of the URLs or the adaptive web design.

These types of tools are used both to manage e-commerce and for corporate websites, blogs, forums, etc. However, depending on the content and size of the web page, you must use a CMS content manager or another, but the requirements that must always be met are;

• Load speed. An optimal CMS must have an efficient response capacity, a powerful caching system and CSS and JS minification, among others.

• Title and meta description. It is the information that users see on search engine results pages. According to this, they will decide whether or not to click on a website, so you have to be able to configure it in a structured way without problems.

• Redirects. The CMS must have a redirection system that allows you to manage pages such as those with 404 errors, penalized by Google.

• Images and videos. In the web content manager, it must be possible to add multimedia content, as well as optimize the weight and size of the files if necessary.

• ALT attributes. ALT tags are a brief description about the image that search engines analyze to interpret the content of the image. In addition, thanks to this attribute, screen readers of people with visual disabilities can describe the content and if the image does not load correctly, all users will know what it is about. Therefore you must be able to edit it in the CMS.

• Structured content. The content manager must allow a good layout of the articles with a suitable hierarchy of titles and H1, H2 and H3 tags.

• URLs. To achieve the best SEO positioning, the URLs must be built based on the information provided, so the best option so that you never miss it is for the CMS to do it automatically, being able to edit it manually if you wish.

• Site map. Sitemaps are XML files that make it easy for search engines. Using a CMS that has a complete RSS and XML sitemap system will keep search engines up to date.

• SSL Certificate. Google rewards secure web certificates (https), look for a CMS that offers you the possibility to easily enable them.

Now that you know some of the keys to choosing the best content management system, we will analyze some of the most popular ones, such as WordPress, PrestaShop, Shopify, Joomla or Drupal.

WordPress

WordPress is still the most used CMS, taking 65.2% of the market share according to the w3techs report. Users consider it one of the best CMS for SEO due to its ease of use, practicality in all types of websites and immediacy.

From its control panel, you will not only be able to easily manage the configuration options, but you will also be able to make and view all the changes you make instantly. In addition, it is already optimized for search engines and has a large number of plugins to address some SEO features that it does not include by default, such as Google XML Sitemaps, AMP and JSON/LD, among others.

Even so, you must bear in mind that installing external modules can pose problems for the security of your web page, it is necessary to update and configure them frequently so that they do not become obsolete. For this reason, it is recommended that WordPress development specialists do it, thus avoiding possible attacks.

PrestaShop

The PrestaShop content manager is designed for e-commerce and offers endless customizable product templates with easy configuration.

Some of its best advantages include the product navigation tool to create categories and subcategories, the possibility of adding a search box in the case of products that appear with a 404 error, and its optimization for search engines in terms of adaptive design.

Shopify

Shopify is a commercial CMS with a hosting platform, designed with the idea that users could fully manage their eCommerce and positioning itself as the second most used and best CMS.

For this reason, it has very relevant SEO practices for search engine optimization, such as automatically generating sitemap.xml files, integrated analysis or supporting PCI by managing security issues.

Joomla

The Joomla CMS is similar to WordPress for its extensions and plugins, but stands out for its multilingual functionality, offering more than 70 languages, and for its SEO and SEF practices. It has optimal cache management and a system with several versions to choose from, friendly URLs with manual adjustments, gzip compression and redirects. You can also configure the characteristics of the page to modify the menu or the multimedia elements, among others.

Drupal

The Drupal content manager has always stood out for being a very flexible CMS that seeks to favor organic positioning, but this has also caused users to see it as complex.

It allows creating sites with a high volume of information and traffic, automatically resizes and optimizes images, minifies CSS and JS and allows flexible URLs. It will also help you to know that it has the best reputation for security, even being chosen by the US government.

If you have coding skills or a team of developers, Drupal is one of the best open-source CMS you will find.

At Dobuss we work daily with different CMS and we value the use of all the tools based on the specific needs of each company to achieve the best SEO positioning and a user experience that avoids the bounce rate and retains potential customers.

If you have questions about which CMS is best for your website or how we can help you manage it, contact us.