Content Management System (CMS) is a buzzword in the IT industry these days. While business and website owners want a CMS just because it sounds so impressive, website developers love it for all the benefits it has brought. Thanks to CMS, there is hardly any need to hand code HTML and PHP scripts. That does not imply that there is no need of a developer anymore. CMS is simply a tool to help a developer create better solutions in less time.
The one difficult issue, perhaps, is making the right choice between WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, three of the most popular and powerful CMSs out there. All of them are open-source tools based on PHP and MySQL with regular updates. Each has extra plugins including ones for SEO. The plugins are called plugins in WordPress, extensions an Joomla and modules in Drupal.
While there are many factors on which a CMS is compared, an important one is its SEO friendliness. Let’s take a look at WordPress, Joomla and Drupla and determine how each one rates on the SEO scale.
ABOUT WORDPRESS
WordpressWordPress has been around since 2003 as an open source blogging tool and CMS platform. More than 200 million websites online are based on WordPress. Due to its notable user-friendliness, it is considered the foremost choice for small websites and blogs.
With WordPress, everything is so easy that many website and blog owners just choose to do it all by themselves. This definitely earns it negative points from developers.
As one of the most commonly used CMS, WordPress offers thousands of plug-ins and a huge community ready to help, two very attractive incentives.
When it comes to features, WordPress proves to be more generous than most people expect CMSs to be. A basic WP website not only offers the usual search, comment, tag, index, etc., but also provides multi-level access and authorship for up to ten users.
SEO for WordPress
For SEO, WordPress is perhaps the most powerful CMS, most favorite as well, due to a plethora of SEO plugins and its supportive community. The SEO module All in One SEO pack allows you greater control over your titles, descriptions and duplicate content. Another good module is Google XML Sitemaps which automatically generates a sitemap to submit to Google webmaster tools. Features such as tagging, indexing and WP’s clean URLs make things even better. WordPress sites can get a high ranking; however, as with any website your ranking greatly depends on the effort you put in the keyword selection and optimization process. Contact Red Carpet Web Promotion to optimize your WordPress site.
ABOUT JOOMLA
JoomlaUnlike WordPress which is foremost a blogging platform, Joomla is and always has been a pure CMS; consequently, it offers a window of opportunity for developers as well as designers. Because it is not that simple to use, it is unlikely that just anyone could create a Joomla-based website without help from a developer.
The best thing about Joomla is that it offers plenty of room for customization. There are numerous extensions and plug-ins, which further add to its abilities.
Joomla has a powerful API which enables easy integration into other systems and software. Therefore, there are endless possibilities for developers to create unique and customized websites.
SEO for Joomla
When it comes to SEO, Joomla has been severely criticized since its inception. And although there is ongoing talk about its awful built-in URLs and encrypted plug-ins, newer updates and extensions have changed the story. A proficient developer with a broad understanding of SEO can obtain great results and ranking with Joomla. However, it still lacks ease-of-use and is not considered favorable in terms of SEO. But given the popularity of Joomla over 400 extensions come up in a search for SEO. A few of these SEO extensions facilitate the job of optimizing titles descriptions, page names, links and other factors. Contact Red Carpet Web Promotion to optimize your Joomla site.
ABOUT DRUPAL
DrupalJust like Joomla, Drupal offers flexibility and power to handle huge, complex and highly customized websites. Released in 2001, it is also the most senior among the three open source CMSs under discussion here. Developers love it because it does not limit their ability to create large, robust and scalable websites.
One major difference between Joomla and Drupal is that the latter is more developer-centric rather than designer-centric.
Drupal offers better extensibility than Joomla or WordPress. The add-ons are easier to integrate with the core and third-part systems alike. Overlapping issues are not common, making Drupal a reliable platform as well.
Drupal is an excellent choice for a website where security is a key factor. Even the third party extensions are almost as secure as Drupal core.
SEO for Drupal
Drupal takes the cake here. Although, WordPress does offer best SEO possibilities, it is still not flexible and robust enough for large and complex websites. Drupal offers a good level of control over SEO. It has everything ranging from SEO-friendly URLs to extensive SEO modules. Moreover, there are plenty of tools that automate the whole SEO aspect for a website. Contact Red Carpet Web Promotion to optimize your Drupal site.
Conclusion
There is simply no point of argument or viable comparison between these three most popular open source CMS as they widely differ. The choice depends on the website’s requirements and the developer’s own style and preference. Nevertheless, SEO for WordPress tends to yield better results and ranking if forced to choose. The content of the website, the keyword choices the optimization and the quality incoming links are much bigger factors for good search engine rankings than the choice of CMS.
Written by Tammy Corbett
Tammy Corbett is the resident expert for social media marketing at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc.
www.redcarpetweb.com