SE Friendly Free CMS Round Up

[Nick W]

Hi,

This post is for those of you that are either CMS savvy or not. If you're
still building sites by hand, then I hope you'll find this particularly
useful.

Please add your favorite SE Friendly CMS software
I can only really comment on the ones that I know about ;-)

SE Friendly CMS Systems

Drupal.org
This is community building software but can easily be "dumbed down" to act as
an information site, shopping site or almost anything else you'd care to
mention. It's my personal favorite. It's SE freindly straight out the box,
you just need to enable some modules in the admin panel. I wrote a tutorial for this here The
new drupal 4.5-rc1 is now out, i can tell you from personal experience that it
ROCKS!

Mambo
A couple of my friends really like this one, i've not tried it but I
understand that with a mod-rewrite module added it'll be totally SE friendly.
Has all the standard features you'd expect from a CMS package.

Typo3
For larger, multi authored sites this looks like a dream, has one varible in
the urls straight out of the box but i beleive there is a mod for this. The features
list proves this and is quite a read! - Looks tough to get to grips with initially but
for large corporate websites this one just looks Wicked...

XOOPS
Similar to Typo3 in the web applications it's best suited for (larger sites)
XOOPS is *not* as SE Friendly as the above 3. URLs typically have 2/3 vars in
them and the modules have a deep directory structure. Why am i listing it
then? - because it's a serious bit of kit is why! I've used it personally and
it really is quite somthing. There are mods to make it SE Friendly.

Please add the CMS you use to this list!

So, if you're looking for an FREE CMS system that's SE friendly, start
with the 4 systems above and then work your way through the other suggestions
that i hope will follow this post, have fun!

Nick

[littleman]

That's a very informative post Nick. One thing that seems to be missing still today is a lite weight CMS system that has no heavy dependencies. I wrote one for personal use which runs on text files, it isn't good enough for public consumption yet, but maybe some day I'll put more time into it.

[SanDiegoSEO]

www.sandiegomedia.com has developed an incredibly strong CMS (MaxEXP) that is completely SEO friendly.

Examples of sites that were built in this cms are:
www.surefire.com
www.homecontrols.com

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

I would like to distinguish between:

"Search Engine Friendly" and "Search Engine Marketing Enabled"

The first being the ability to actually get indexed. That is without a doubt the most important thing, but once you have you site indexed you want it to rank well too. Some systems have build in tools that will help you with that, ranging from unique titles, automated scripting of META-descriptions, automated frequency analysis for META-keywords, automated subject based time dependend cross linking, build in RSS feeds etc. etc. No system has it all - but some have far more than others.

I'd like to add one system to the list - it's not free, but I had some good experience with it from the start. It comes with automated build in ISAPI rewrite: Synkron.Web I used to be affiliated with the company, helping them improve their system (in exhange for a free license) but I am not directly connected to them anymore.

[grnidone]

THANK YOU Nick.
Honestly, I was just going to ask this question when I saw this thread. Quickie question though: in what language is Drupal written? Perl? PHP?

[Nick W]

Quickie answer

PHP/MySQL

Nick

[mediatech]

Originally Posted by Mikkel deMib Svendsen

I would like to distinguish between:
"Search Engine Friendly" and "Search Engine Marketing Enabled"

I get excellent results from TYPO3 in both categories. Granted I'm targeting a rather obscure keyword combination but so long as I'm #1 and get traffic I'm quite happy

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=typo3+templates
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=typo3+template

TYPO3 can also produce a variety of URLs including:

http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/list/