by Chris Glenn, Principal & Director of Technology ~ Digital Function, LLC Houston, TX
This article is meant to inform consumers of the facts, as I perceive them, of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and CMS (Content Management Software). Let me first clarify the role of the CMS used to manage a web site. I find this to be a very important issue because I believe consumers are unfairly targeted by SEO companies claiming that the consumer needs to move to a whole new web site management solution in order to attain strong search engine rankings for their website.
 
As the title of this article states, humans must perform solid SEO, as it is impossible for the software to perform this task. The role of the CMS is to provide the user with interfaces to enable the user to perform the tasks needed to properly optimize their site. To be fair there are rules that can be setup to automatically populate the title tag with the most used keyword phrase on the page or to automatically populate the ALT tags with a human readable value based on the image file name. I can go on and on how the software can be manipulated to perform such algorithmic tasks but what about the quality of the results. Would you trust a piece of software to write your ad copy or your brochure copy? Probably not! SEO is a human task and should be performed by humans.
 
Your CMS should offer the user the access to perform the SEO tasks on their site. I am not here to tell you how to properly optimize your site but I will point out that there is basically two parts to optimizing your site. Not only do you have to structure the DOM to adhere to search engine guidelines, you must also write content that is optimized. There is a strategy in optimizing web pages and no piece of software can execute the strategy at a level that matches an SEO expert. To find more information about these guidelines you can start by visiting:

Yahoo's
(http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html)

or

Google's (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769)

So, if you are in the market for a new CMS solution then you will now know how important it is that the solution supports the known guidelines and offers the user the access to implement the guidelines. If you already have a solution in place then you should investigate if your solution is allowing you this access and supports the guidelines. If you are approached by a company claiming you need to move to a new solution for better SEO results then you should make sure they are suggesting this due to your current CMS and its features or if they are simply slipping in an "up sell" to their service offering. You may not end up with the solution that fits your business as a whole and that ultimately hurts your bottom line.