SEO - what is the best, search engine friendly open source CMS?
I built a website with Joomla! on my own. While Joomla does cool things, over time, I've grown to kind of hate it - its UI is a bloody bitch, its urls are heinously ugly, and my content is not getting indexed by SEs in a timely fashion.
Joomla has SEO components that don't work with my other extensions and I am reluctant to add more extensions, because each time I do, I find incompatibilities and bugs that I don't have the budget or time to fix on my own (I am not a developer). More extensions seems to slow things down, as well.
Here's my deal:
- the site is http://mariri.net
- SEO is important to me for my website
- I want to keep the look/ feel
- I am a 1 woman shop who wants to spend as little $ as I can on any transition or site improvement (this is a labor of love, not a highly lucrative commercial venture)
- I also have limited free time
1) What's the most search engine friendly open-source CMS out there?
1.5) Is it possible to SEO my existing site better, without compromising speed, or having to ditch the other extensions that were so painstakingly installed - in particular, the iJoomla magazine interface?
2) Would it make sense to have a developer skin the look/ feel of my site and transfer my website content over to a new platform? I have 40 pages of content.
3) I've received 2 recommendations to transfer all my content over to WordPress and do 301 redirects from old pages, but this seems like a downgrade to me, especially if I want to expand the functionality of the site- e.g. add forum, shopping, etc.
Any words of wisdom greatly appreciated! And thanks in advance!
Cheers,
Lorna
Clarification added November 20, 2007:
I've tried Artio JoomSEF and found problems with dupe urls from RSS feed content I was displaying and url rewriting issues with content from the iJoomla magazine interface I use - such as urls for the author section.
Is there a Joomla SEO extension that doesn't mess up like this?
Good Answers (1)
Hi Lorna,
Here is my comments on your questions
1) The Most Search Engine Friendly CMS is Wordpress. SEO of Wordpress. But it has limitation of modules you might not able to add more functionality.
1.5) joomSEF is one of best joomla extensions for SEO and support most of all other famous extensio. You can try that also. You can also take help from any joomla developer or SEO expert for better result.
2) I don't think its good idea to skin the look/ feel of site and transfer my website content over to a new platform.
3)As i told earlier wordpress is best for SEO not for functionality. Its better to have joomla for functionality.
Suggestion: Keep you site on joomla. Use JoomlaSEF and its module for SEO. Install Wordpress as blog and other site related content.
Best Wishes
Kanudan
Links:
More Answers (11)
Hi Lorna,
The best solution for Joomla! is a simple SEF (Search Engine Friendly) plug-in. I shopped around quite a bit before I found this one. It blows everything else out of the water. http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2380/Itemid,35/
Give a ring and I'll walk you through how to optimize.
Cheers!
/Zander
Links:
I would suggest you consider DotNetNuke (http://www.dotnetnuke.com). This is a free open source CMS which has many modules available for extending your sites functionality. I have been using it for some time and found it is easy to learn, use and has a sizeable community and user base.
You will need to develop a skin, site template(s), from your current design to use with DotNetNuke. There are many resources for hosting and services available on the DotNetNuke site. I also do web development and can help you with skin development and hosting. Please feel free to contact me if I can help you further.
Jerry Shields
HI Lorna
This is more of an answer to the main question - MySource Matrix is an open source CMS and is really effective with SEO.
In terms of work you can do on your site, you might find the SEO like a Pro white paper interesting too.
Good luck!
Alister
Links:
Joomla with SEF is the way to go.
Links:
I've been testing out various CMS setups for the past couple years, and I've had tremendous success working with Drupal. I don't know if it's the BEST for SEO, but with the right settings it's clean and pretty search engine friendly.
Drupal modules make the system flexible, so you can add as much or as little functionality as you like. Most modules are practically plug-n-play minus some administrative settings that have to be setup, such as user access rights. For the most part, Drupal users have already created and posted modules for forums, shopping, etc. as you mention above.
Some aspects of Drupal can have a slight learning curve if you try to create custom modules, but the community support is incredible, and just posting on the Drupal forums I've been able to find others who have already implemented the features I've tried to add. There's never a lack of people willing to help.
Links:
I think the question may be a bit skewed. What you need is a CMS that allows you complete control of on-page factors. Title, desc, h1,h2, links, p etc. as well as clean urls. As long as the CMS provides that level of control you should be fine, and I believe they nearly all do now. SEO is all about content control (onpage factors) and offsite exposure. Here is a in-depth SEO guide we created that should shine some light on the issue.
Links:
Kamo A
Hello
Best Answers in: Internet Marketing (4), Staffing and Recruiting (1), Direct Marketing (1), E-Commerce (1)
SEs love Drupal. Try it.
Links:
I've used Joomla! with SEF and Google seems like it. Pages found deep into my site have been crawled and placed in Google's search results.
I've extremely limited experience with open source CMS as opposed to enterprise software, but for my blog have been very happy with Wordpress, the level of community around it, and its available modules' effectiveness at creating crawler-friendly URLs as well as minimizing duplicate content. Bear in mind when considering applications for work on-domain, technical "friendliness" doesn't always mean fully "optimized" as that means content development and publishing strategy in addition. So beyond making sure the URLs aren't beastly long and dynamic, having control over keywords and delimiters is very important.
Anyway, those are the main SEO related issues I think of re. CMS, though it's important to watch for other potential issues. I'll add also that some of available Wordpress plug-ins can be used in combination to apply disparate best practices to posts both at the feed-level and the landing-page level, which is another nice thing about that platform...
I've played with Drupal lightly on one project and found it's OK in terms of general development setup, though I wasn't scrutinizing it with an SEO eye at the time and do tend to hear praises for Joomla more now a couple years later.
Overall Kanudan's line of thinking sounds like it could be a good way to go, i.e. consider a combination of tools. Get the functionality and control you need and then task someone with keeping the brand and usability, i.e. front-end, as well-unified as possible.
Good luck!
I have used Joomla with SEF and have not been so pleased. It has not been as solid and consistent as I would like. Their are sometimes problems with the conversion of the titles to URL safe text.
I have switched to Django which give complete control over the URL. So far I am very happy with it.
Links:
Michael L
Owner, FreedomFire Communications and Telecommunications Consultant
Best Answers in: Telecommunications (5), Web Development (4), Small Business (3), Starting Up (2), Computers and Software (2), Advertising (1), Direct Marketing (1), Internet Marketing (1), Search Marketing (1)
Here's a couple options for consideration. The first you will do the work. In the second someone else will do it all for you.
