The Portable Consultant’s current client’s web sites are under the management of the Sales & Marketing group. They would like to ensure that any new CMS won’t create complex URLs that would upset the search engines that come calling.

Today’s CMS’s tend to create URLs with long strings of unintelligible parameters. They work better this way, but people do not. More importantly, it turns out, neither do search engines. These “ugly URLs” are not only hard for users to remember and enter into their browser, but are also awkward for search engines to use when crawling links within a site. They may well bypass many or all of the internal pages of a site for this reason.

While looking for a good explanation of these issues to show my client I came across Non-Linear Creations’ whitepaper SEO and CMS: Implementing Best Practices. A version of this paper by Randy Woods and Julie Batten is available on CMS Watch with the title Embedding SEO Best Practices in CMS Implementations.

Cheers,
-pmh

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