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CMS and SEO: So Happy Together

Remember when your Mother used to tell you to play nice with the other kids at school?  The parents of CMS and SEO need to do the same.  CMS and SEO at their very core are trying to solve the same issues.  They desire to help businesses be more effective in their online endeavors.  Unfortunately, CMS and SEO have taken different paths to meet their end goals.  Let it stop! 

Today, CMS and SEO are primarily only children of parents who work with each other out of obligation.  Understanding is the key to acceptance, so let’s review what the two are about.

Site owners are experts in their industry; therefore, they need a system that allows them and other members of their team to update their content whenever and wherever they want.  This is the core solution that CMS provides.  On the flip side, site owners also need to get people to their website when they are searching for their information, product, or organization.  This is where SEO comes in.

With that said, there are some core issues that need to be addressed before things get better.  CMS needs to become more flexible, allowing SEO to have dramatically more control over the elements of the HTML stream that affect search engine optimization efforts.

What irks SEO the most about CMS is the features that help non-technical people update their sites.  SEO needs to grasp the importance of CMS being simple for everyone.  A good solution is for CMS to remain simple but allow more advanced users the ability to override what is working against SEO efforts.

Due to the rigidity of current CMSs, SEO is notorious for taking CMS and stapling on a multitude of plug-ins.  This practice is why companies complain about the usability of their CMS.  These bionic CMSs are created by people with tech savviness and thus inhibit non-technical site owners and their teams from having control over their content. 

The bottom line is CMS and SEO come from different sides of the tracks and their weak attempts at working together are frustrating everyone who requires their assistance.  CMSs trying to disguise themselves as “Search Friendly” and SEOs trying to engineer their own CMS; really, who are they kidding?  These actions never satisfy and don’t provide real solutions because neither is coming to the realization that they desperately need the other.   

The solution is fraternal twins.  Being born together with the same foundation, CMS and SEO complement each other and work seamlessly to provide a real business solution.  When CMS and SEO are together from birth, you don’t have to tell them to play nice, they just do.

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