maverick

I'm looking to transfer one of my sites to a CMS based solution and am looking for a solution which is not only easy to use but also optimized for SEO.

The site is pretty basic and has no major features required so I have looked at Joomla (which i used on other sites) but again I'm concerned about its use for SEO

Would you suggest I use this (with some paid SEO plug ins) or go for a commercial script (if so which one)

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geoline

My favorit is wordpress. You can use it for blogs and a non-blog-sites as well. It's open source and there a thousends of great plugins available. But you have to invest a little work to customize it the way you need it.

[R]DeVore

wordpress. you wont find anything better

bigbyte

Evo-Articles is free. I use it on several sites with great success.

Chris

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dekalog6

I use ExpressionEngine. It is extremely flexible and has unlimited fields and subcategories which I don't think Wordpress is capable of. You will need to use their scripting to customize your site but it's pretty straightforward. I'm mainly a designer not a coder and I was able to figure it out. A key point for me is the support and it is excellent. That was worth the price of the software for me.

You can basically build the site any way you want in html and css and sprinkle their tags where you need them.

It is paid software for the full blown commercial product but they have a limited core edition for free if you want to try it out. It's worth taking a look.

ExpressionEngine - Publish Your Universe!

kdawg

I'm curious about what people on here think specifically of Joomla and Drupal for SEO.

I've been wanting to play with them for a while, but haven't found the time.

Digit

Last I remember they were pretty bloated, which isn't good for SEO.

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maverick

I know there are a lot of paid SEO tools for Joomla, are they all crap or would you recommend any?

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shokthx

WordPress has so much going for it. Add something like Semiologic theme to it or Rapid Niche Websites if you want further customization.

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paowiee

i tried using Joomla before but I just couldn't figure out how to lay it all out... the expression engine looks really neat especially for a huge content site may look into it soon.

but for now Wordpress for me is king (it's the only cms/blog that i understand)

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claudek

Bloat has nothing to do with SEO. A while ago when thinking of using Joomla or Drupal for a site, my research showed Drupal to have better SEO/indexing results. Drupal is powerful but I did not have time to learn then so disregarded both and used Snews instead.

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guysmy

ARTIO JoomSEF for joomla --> free and pretty damn powerful

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bloodwrath

I use joomla on several sites.
Its a great CMS, but the seo needs to be tweaked..

Here are a few addons that i use
opensef for url rewritting, as you can lock the url and not have it rewrite.
SEF patch extended version A Joomlatwork.com component.
(this is the paid version) they offer a free one as well
this sef patch fixes joomla title tags, u can setup a unique title tag per page, much more customizable that joomla's default tags. it also add more features, that the main on i use.

barman

Wordpress is great for SEO, but i swear it is a huge pain in the ass to work with. It just tries to do too many things automatically that I would like to have control of.

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znine

Drupal is actually pretty good for seo, use clean url feature and the path or pathauto module that will turn /node/23 into /giant-butt-plugs. Other modules to take a look at are the meta tags module and the page title module. But out of the box with clean urls and path or pathauto enabled, Drupal is not bad at all. Oh and check out Search Engine Optimization | groups.drupal.org.

Doobus

Wordpress is pretty much SEOd out of the box, with the exception of the permalink structure and title, which can easily be modified. The only other thing I can think of is the templates, some of the templates for download I don't like how they use the H1, H2, and H3 tags, however I don't think too many people stress out about this issue, but since I'm a perfectionist I usually make the adjustments if needed.

Drupal in terms of SEO I give second place to because I actually got the clean url feature to run as intended vs Joomla's openSEF which I couldn't... meh. At a glance Drupal's code is much cleaner than Joomla's although I haven't gotten much of a chance to look at Joomla 1.5 so that may have changed. However Drupal has a steep learning curve, the community are a bunch of tech heads, and if you don't know enough about Drupal, help is pretty hard to come by for free.

I personally don't like Joomla, I think the only reason Joomla is more popular than Drupal is because of the newbie friendly community/environment, and its a Fantastico install.

jchunk

Well, wordpress is NOT seo'd out-of-the-box. You have to change the url, etc. But with a few plugins you can do a good job. Read this post (it's dutch, but just follow the links to the plugins): SEOKING.nl » Zoekmachine optimalisatie voor Wordpress blogs

For wordpress there are some quite nifty plugins, like one that's automatically making certain words clickable and points them to another of your blogpostings. These are quite handy and can be good for internal linking, etc.

I use ExpressionEngine - Publish Your Universe! by the way. Very flexible and seo friendly. Not free, but for the long term sites i would definitly go with EE.

Doobus

I said it was "pretty" much seo'd out of the box, not completely seo'd out of the box. Your just repeating what I already said regarding the url, title, and using optimized themes.

Regarding the site you referred, there isn't much else offered. I can't understand the site because it's written in dutch, however I noticed the post pointed out using google sitemap, I have cross tested this on two sites and honestly I didn't notice a difference. About the ping services list, I would just hit up pingoat.com.

You say EE is very flexible and seo friendly, I'm not quite sure what you mean with flexibility, and Wordpress is pretty damn seo friendly, plus it's free. There is a bunch of things you can do to make Wordpress more optimized like you said regarding a plugin that can automatically make certain words clickable pointing to another post, you can even go one further by using a plugin that places related articles on the bottom of each page.

I'm not bagging on EE, but you'll have to give me more than just "I would definitely go with EE." I mean is it open source? How big is the community, are there plugins/mods made by developers, or is this strictly released by EE... What benefits does EE have over Wordpress in terms of longevity? If you don't mind on giving me a more in-depth look into EE, I would appreciate it, I like to keep my options open :P.

lucab

LOL. EE fuckin' blows. I checked out the site.... you're going to charge for features like 'wiki module,' or 'tell-a-friend module,' let alone charge an extra $50-$100 for a forum on top of a $99 to $250 price tag for the 'full' version?

gay

explain what your CMS can do that Drupal can't.

jchunk

Oh gosh.. if you earn some bucks $100 is peanuts. I do not mention all the pro's and con's here but if you search on the big www you'll find out that EE is at this time one of the most popular cms's out there under the prosumers. Can WP handle multiple domains from one database/installation? No, but with EE you can. And i'm not going to define the word "flexible" here. But i can say EE is more flexible than WP and Drupal. Due it's fexibility and the EEtags seo is much easier and more efficient. Templating in EE is the most wonderful thing i ever did. I'm on a macbook pro with textmate so i grabbed the TextMate ExpressionEngine Bundle. With thsese programs and with docksend from Transmit (a ftp prog for mac) i make and edit templates in a few minutes. Really easy. Also you can define your site structure by yourself. EE doesn't presume - like WP - you want everything ordered on date. You can decide for yourself.

Oh, the EE community is really great. Because you pay for a license you'll be certain from getting professional help within a few minutes mostly. And god, EE is closed source. I'm happy with that while EE has never ever had known exploits. Did you take a look on the list of former security issues with WP? There you go..

Take also a look at Jambor-ee - Celebrating ExpressionEngine

LazyHippy

Second that.

Drupal is very flexible, powerful and pretty good for SEO from my (limited) experience. It might be overkill for a lot of projects though and has a pretty steep learning curve. If you were considering a commercial CMS, you might be better with an opensource one and paying someone to sort it out.

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