Yes, that is right, they all fail at Search Engine Optimization…
I have been reading several new posts about how well WordPress is doing SEO compared to Joomla! and how good Drupal is in SEO compared to WordPress and….well, you get the general idea.
it seems that every time people are defending their choice to use a certian Content management system. Which is a good thing, you can show people the reasons why you love the system(s) that you use.
We all do, we all like the system of our choice, whether it is WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Modx, Typo3, etc,etc. They are all great open source content management systems.
The Big Three, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.
I have written before how Search Engine Friendly WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal can be, but they don't do SEO…, YOU do SEO…
That is right, they don't do anything else then giving you the tools to get your website ready for higher rankings and better performance in the search engines!
You are the deciding factor in how well search engine optimization is done. You and the webmaster and content writers of your website.
None of the content management systems will come up to you and say, here is a great keyword rich title for your post. None of them will provide you with the keyword rich quality content that attracts visitors and back-links.
That is all up to you.
None of these content management systems will give you the right structure and internal linking ideas for the content of your site based on relevant keywords and none of them will do that keyword research for you.
They are just what they say the are, content management systems. You can use them for building websites, for building blogs, for building community's, but they still remain content management systems.
They are the engines that drive your website and/or Blog, but you have to work with them to get a really search engine optimized website.
The deciding factor for great search engine optimization
It is up to you to get the most out of the system of your choice and you will see that you can do it!
Either with WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal, or any other system, you have the knowledge and the ideas to get better rankings for you site.
You know your system of choice and you are the engineer that knows how to fire up that engine to drive it up to the best possible spot in the search engine results pages!
So don't blame or praise a website building engine for getting search engine optimization done right, praise yourself for doing a job well done.
Andrew Eddie says
Well said.
John says
Would you use Joomla or WordPress to build a community portal?
Jack Bremer says
While you have some good points here about content generation (and after all, content is king), it’s important to understand that these CMSs can do a lot of the behind-the-scenes SEO for you – human-readable URLs, meta tags, Titles, alt/title tags on images and links for example and to name but a few – they either automate or prompt you for them. For someone new to site management and content generation,this is a godsend – concentrate on the content, and let the CMS get the nuts’n’bolts of it right.
Once site is ticking along nicely, begin to strategise how to acheive quality backlinks and like – if you haven’t already!
My CMS of choice is Joomla by the way…
jQuery Tutorials says
@John, I would use Drupal for community website. WordPress is a blogging CMS, Joomla is a good CMS but not as much as Drupal with all the modules and the ability to EASILY add extend it.
Jeremy says
Agreed and well put. I think you could even expand and say that all of them can be used to accomplish 95% of the projects you come across (not just for SEO), it becomes a matter of which skills you possess with each of the systems.
As to the comments, funny how even a post about how they can all fit your needs whittles down to someone asking which one is better for something.
Hummerbie says
@John: I agree with jQuey for choosing Drupal for a community site, although http://www.jomsocial.com/ is a new and really good looking (commercial) Joomla component that does the job as well.
@jack, exactly why I included the link to an older post about those needed sef and seo possibilitys per cms.
@jQuery, yes Drupal is good for community sites, but it has a steeper learning curve than Joomla!
@Jeremy: I allways like it when people ask questions :-) gives me an oppertunity to learn as well.
Paulino Michelazzo says
Good words but hard for customers understand it. Some of these words sound hard to them because they believe that a CMS tool can solve all the problems (including bird and swine flu). Can be a new kind of job “explain what you need to do with your CMS tool to have a good SEO” in few time?
Best
Hummerbie says
@Paulino: I think it should be common to explain your customers what you do and why.
That will give them a better understanding and after that you can also learn them how to write good articles.
Some might think that they would eliminate the need for their services that way, but my experience is that they will recommend you and your services to others and thus keeping you in business.
Best part of those referrals is that it brings you a large variety of topics to work on… which keeps my job pretty interesting!
Matt Farina says
I think the issue at hand is that most people don’t know the difference between a system that is SEF if used correctly and doing SEO on your material/content.
There has been a lot of misinformation to lead people down the wrong road on this one.
joomla web development says
joomla is really good for SEO.
Keith Roshleberger says
Not to be a cynic, but this article reads as if it was written for search engines. You just keep hammering away at your keywords. SEO, CMS, Joomla, WordPress, Drupal…gimme a break! Makes for an extremely painful read. Isn’t that one of the cardinal rules of SEO? Don’t make it too obvious that that’s what it was written for?
It’s a shame that this is actually working, because all I get is crap when I search for something I’m looking for… useless “content” made especially for search engines. That’s how I found this gibberish.
Hummerbie says
@Keith Roshleberger: i am sorry you feel that way, but it the post was written to show people thet it is not the system that makes you pages rank well.
And yes, sicne I do write about SEO and all the other keywords you mention, it is possible you fond it on thaose terms, but then again, this whole blog is about all that Jazz :-)
And since you ar looking for “Joomla WordPress” you might want to try them both on your local machine using XAMPP and see what you find works best for you.
quang ba website says
At a post in Matt Cutts’s Blog, he say that WordPress can do 90% SEO work, but I don’t think so. I’m agree with you that, CMS doesn’t do SEO, WE do SEO. For exemple, with WordPress, you can find easily 5 source of duplicated content from archive by tags, archive by category, by date, RSS, blog pagnation, … and more.
Indy says
don’t write a shit! why do you use this wordpress site? do you don’t have a better choice or idea to write this post on a other, better site, made with the better seo?
Hummerbie says
@indy: I also have several Joomla based websites on which I write about Joomla SEO. I write my idea’s on the platforms I think work best to get in contact with other people and exchange idea’s on SEO and Joomla as well.
To you just a little question, why do you use part of my RSS Feed (I don’t mind that) on your Joomla based website and why is your SEO page a copy of Google’s SEO Answer?
Or is your comment just to get a backlink to your website as part of your SEO Strategy?
Indy says
hi hummerbie!
thanks for you reply on my post. sorry for my english, i am from slovakia and i am never learned english in the school. thats only “my” english :-)
ok, i will go step by step to follow you post.
1) “Yes, that is right, they all fail at Search Engine Optimization…”
do you know any cms or other html prog they write a seo friendly text (content) for you? i don’t.
2) of course, it is simpler to build a site with right seo content in dreamweaver or other html prog as with a cms, because a cms need a knowledge of structure and how it is work. u can’t see what u do, u can see it on the frontend, but not in the backend. i mean, if u write a article u need to know where is the place, categorie or section of this article. if u use a original joomla section-category-article structure with they sef building, u right, thats absolutely not SEO FRIENDLY. but if u know, what is to do with them u can build a excelente SEO website, very quickly and u have a full controll over all meta tags for each section, category and article. if u want build a big site with a good seo just with handwriten html, then good luck!
or any better ideas, how to build a huge, good, seo web site without a cms like joomla???
Indy says
…answer to user “QUANG BA WEBSITE”
“with WordPress, you can find easily 5 source of duplicated content from archive by tags, archive by category, by date, RSS, blog pagnation, … and more.”
—————————————————————————-
google don’t care duplicate content they are compiled from cms system. google know that wordpress and other cms build a duplicate content and it will be acepted.
Mike Law says
I agree to a certain extent, out of the box they are all fine and there are plenty of plug-ins and extensions to provide further enhancements. There are also plenty of tools available today such as Google Webmaster Tools to help ensure your site is properly optimized.
By the way still trying to find a duplicate content checker (checks entire page not just title tags). Would be a long process though as every page would have to be compared to every other page.
Also an outbound link checker which makes sure all sites you are linking to are indexed and haven’t been banned from Google. So if anyone knows where I can find either of those that would be great!
Anyway back to the original topic :) I think it’s when you start plugging in things to your CMS that it can start to get messy. It’s not always easy to make changes to these extensions as you need to go digging through PHP.
The majority of us are not going to just go with a plain install we are going to add a lot of additional stuff so I think SEO is more down to how SEF the extensions are that you use rather than the CMS itself.
Mike Law says
…and that goes for the template or theme which you use to, that plays a big role in how SEF your site is. Sorry, just thought that needed to said too ;)
Hummerbie says
@Mike Law: Yes, some components you use can have a strange effect on SEO, For Joomla you can use a tool like sh404SEF to improve that even if the component self is not SEF. It just takes a lot more work to get it right.
And good point, your template also plays a role in SEF, the better and lighter the coding the better it will perform.
Indy says
hi, this site is 1 month old. go to google.ie and search for “private investigator”. this page is right now on place 20 (yesterday 23) from 14,800 pages and in ca. 2 weeks will be on the 1. page. the only one thing is, you must know, what you doing and how.
Indy says
…sorry, here the link to the site: http://www.empire-security.com
George says
I think in the Joomla SEO the ranking of the site is increasing in slowly First off, how long has your site been up? Google only gives out page ranks twice a year.
Indy says
this site is was redesigned 3 months ago. For keywords “security company” “private investigator” “private investigators” “security companies” is on the 1. page on google.ie.
Hummerbie says
@George: Page ranks is not a real issue anymore, the only thing Google will use it for is the frequency of crawling your site.
The higher your PR the more you get crawled.
It has no influence on the sites results in the search engine results pages.
If you use a tool in Firefox like the SEOBook toolbar or Rankquest that will show you the PR of a site directly in that SERP you will be suprised by the number of sites that outperform high pr sites.
Indy says
yes, thats right! e.g. you can find a sites with pr8 and #110 on google or a page with pr0 on the 1st page.
Kristian Hildebrandt says
There is definately a point about what you have said, but some cms natively still do a better job optimizing for the web than others.
If you know your cms and some seo principles, I belieive you will always archieve good results with any cms.
Seo Firm says
…….any ideas on how to export mojoBlog content into Joomla? All the solutions I’ve found for importing WordPress stuff into Joomla doesn’t exist or doesn’t work anymore.
subagio says
Talk about crawling, google give webmaster a tool, to send sitemap, so we dont need to wait until our web get crawling, sure perma link is seo friendly
John says
I used sh404SEF for a while to get friendly URLs on my Joomla site. They didn’t look too friendly to me, but it worked for the search engines and delivered a lot of traffic.
Unfortunately, I made the biggest mistake you can ever make with any CMS – I left some of the mods out of date and it doesn’t take long before someone will find out and take advantage of that.
For now and in to the future though, I will probably continue to focus my efforts on WordPress. It doesn’t have all of the options and features of some other CMS packages, but dang it really is easy to use.
George says
I believe WordPress has some real lacking in features that other CMS packages offer. That is one of the reasons why I’m reluctant to adopt it. Thanks for your clarification and insights.
content management systems says
It depends what you want to do as to whether you use Joomla or WordPress. I’ve found wordpress sites get indexed quicker on the whole, but other than that both are good for SEO with the right plugins in place.
Charlie says
Nice post. I always find WordPress the best. Joomla! isn’t far behind though, just slower.
mamta sharma says
Great and interesting blog. Initially it shocked me as it says the reverse what other says. Anyways thanks for sparking an idea to write blog!
Checker says
Strange post…
Drupal / WordPress / Joomla do not make great websites, YOU do
Dustin says
I have been using WordPress for over one year now and find that the SEO plugins available are amazing! though hard to find they are out there
Yolanda says
My sentiments exactly!
Giving credit to the platform instead of the webmaster is what happens often when trying to defend WordPress. If you truly understand SEO, then you know that the platform doesn’t make the website, its the person behind it that can make or break its success.
accident claims guy says
Well said Sir,
There is no magic in any of these systems and it is up to the siteowner to make sensible decisions and do a little work to get things in order. I have come across so may blogs where everything is posted under “uncategorised” rather than neatly organised into categories. Just one of the things that will make your site more readable to the spoders. It has often been said that google loves blogs, but only if it knows what they are about and its up to the owner to give those spiders a little hint.
Hire Web Developers says
Joomla and WordPress both are very beneficial for CMS. None of the content management systems will come up to you and say, here is a great keyword rich title for your post. None of them will provide you with the keyword rich quality content that attracts visitors and back-links. Great post.