by Manoj Jasra

There are often cases where a business will choose to develop a custom content management system (CMS) rather than buying something off the shelf. I have some first hand experience building my own content management system and can testify that if it's implemented corrrectly it will rank as well as any commercial CMS powered website. The key to a developing a good CMS is to first understand the purpose of your website (requirements) and secondly to design the framework (database, business logic, GUI) to support it. There are also some fundamental SEO related guidelines you should build into your proprietary CMS if you hope to rank well in the search engines.

• Unique Meta Tags: Each page on your website should allow for unique meta tags. This will keep your site away from any supplemental index issues and allow you to rank for a broader range of keywords.
  
• URL Rewriter: Stay away from dynamic URLs/querystring variables to load content, static URLs are the only way to go. Keywords in the URL are an important ranking factor so make sure to use relevant kewyords in your static URLs. Creating static URLs often requires parsing your URL for keywords so that you can query your database for the correct content.
  
• Links: To help search spiders easily crawl throughout the site, add the ability to have unique links within the body content and footer. Implementing a strategy such as bread crumb navigation (with keyword rich anchor text) is both useful for crawlability and search engine rankings.
  
• Content/Keyword Insertion: Not only should your content be unique for each page, you should also allow for your CMS to dynamically insert relevant keywords into your content for image alt tags, links, page copy, and meta tags.

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