CMS – SEO Compare , Joomla WordPress Drupal

SEOMOZ have some experiment : here

Within two weeks the WordPress site was so far ahead that it looked as if they competition was over. Slowly however, Drupal and Joomla have recovered until they now lead the pack. The Joomla site now has 5 top ten rankings in every search engine that we're following and the Drupal site continues to climb, only in second place by a small amount. 

Some interesting points.

 

• Is it a blog? If so, we'll expect it to be updated regularly
• Is it a corporate website? If so, we can expect it to remain relatively unchanged

 

Basically, Google is asking you to decide what kind of site you want to be and then to walk the walk. If run a blog that used to be updated every day, but now hasn't seen fresh content two months, why should Google rank you? Why should searchers have to wade through months-old blog posts?

 

What is the one of the easiest ways Google can determine what kind of site you're running? Your software. If you install a WordPress site you are telling Google that you're starting a blog and that it will be updated regularly. If you install Joomla or Drupal, Google has no such expectations. Maybe that is why WordPress started so strongly, but has since fallen behind. If you don't meet expectations, you will be penalised. 

 

Not just SEO, We should care some topic more,

 

Usability

The conventional wisdom says that the learning curve for Joomla is much greater than for WordPress.  My opinion is that the conventional wisdom is wise in this case.

The two main things that made WordPress easy for me, someone who built his first website three months ago, are the html editor and the template editor.  With WordPress, you can toggle back and forth between your WYSIWYG and html editors for pages and individual posts.  Additionally, most templates break down the PHP coding into easy to use sections like “header,” “footer,” and “main index.”  This made customizing our site’s theme much easier. 

Bottom Line: Your site will look great in about 5 minutes using WordPress, but if you are willing to trade some extra learning time for a more advanced site, go with Joomla.

Versatility

WordPress makes some effort to help you build the site you want, but Joomla is the clear winner here.

WordPress is built for bloggers, featuring comments, tagging, and virtually everything else your blog needs out of the box. Simple. Easy. Straightforward.

Joomla is the better choice if your site is almost anything but a blog. The tough learning curve is partly a function of the advanced features that Joomla provides. You’ll have to spend some more time with it, and Joomla is obsessed with goofy looking contact forms and FAQ pages, but your non-blogging site will thank you.

For example, it’s very easy once you get the hang of it to extend Joomla with e-commerce applications, banner advertising, and great form builders.

Bottom Line: If your site is only a blog, use WordPress. The more cool-looking static content you need, the more Joomla will help you.

 

SEO Tools for CMS

Drupal Modules

1. Block Cache creates cached versions of each block displayed on your website. For each cached block only one SQL query is executed thus reducing server load resulting in better performance and faster delivery of content.
2. Find URL Alias is a utility module that lets you search for particular URL aliases. This module requires the core path module which enables search engine friendly URLs for your site. Find URL Alias is especially useful when there are many aliases stored in your database. But keep in mind that changing URLs is something you should avoid.
3. Google Analytics integrates Google's powerful web statistics tracking system with your website. The module enables you to selectively track users by role.
4. Meta tags allows you to define site wide meta tags and specific tags for each piece of content (node). If you use the core taxonomy module (you really should do) meta tags can be assigned automatically by using the terms (tags) you use to categorize your content.
5. Pathauto automatically generates path aliases based on the modules settings. A very powerful module that lets you define different URL patterns based on content types. In the latest version also allows to filter common words. Requires the core path module.
6. RobotsTxt is useful if you run multiple Drupal sites from a single code base and want to have different robots.txt files for each of them.
7. Service links automatically adds links to social bookmarking and blog search services to your content. You can select which services you want to link to, restrict the display based on content (node) types and whether to display links in teaser and/or full page view.
8. URLify automatically generates the path alias for a piece of content based on its title using JavaScript. Requires the core path module. I lightweight alternative to pathauto.
9. XML Sitemap generates an XML sitemap which complies with the sitemaps.org specification. The relative priority of each piece of content is calculated based on content type, number of comments, and promotion to front page. The values of each of these factors can be set in the admin section of the module.

Joomla Modules, Components, Plugins

1. Advanced SEF Bot for Joomla 1.1.x is a plugin that enables search engine friendly URLs. Since Joomla's standard URLs are not really meaningful this one is a must.
2. Dynamic gSitemap is a PHP script that dynamically creates an XML sitemap of your site when GoogleBot visits it.
3. JoomSEO is a plugin that dynamically creates meta tags, changes the title tag on the fly, adds heading tags to content titles and more. Some of the configurable features include: show, hide or override keywords, site name, and content title, adjust element order in the title and heading tag selection.
4. LinX is a link exchange component that lets you manage a reciprocal link directory. Links that are submitted to your site are automatically checked and only added if there is a link back to your site. A large number of links to your website of course has an effect on the PageRank but what really matters are links from quality and trusted websites that have a similar target audience as your site.
5. MetaTags NX creates meta description and keyword tags for your content on the fly. Keywords are generated based on their frequency in the content and stopwords can be excluded.
6. Redirect component lets you redirect old urls to new ones and set their status codes. Remember, changing URLs often is a bad idea.
7. Simple SEO Plugin uses Yahoo to analyze your content and gives immediate feedback on what Yahoo thinks the content is about. Also creates meta tags.
8. Website Validators Tool contains links to validation and site information services that help you make your website more standards compliant, see how you rank who links to you and more.

 

Joomla SEO

At the suggestion of Bookworm SEO, I decided to write a post about SEO for Joomla sites. [Note: I'm not here to suggest that Joomla is better than WordPress, Drupal, or any other CMS. My goal is simply to discuss some things that can be done with a Joomla site to make it better.] Also, I'm still far from an expert in the SEO field, so take it easy on me.

The big issue with Joomla is that its out-of-the-box settings aren't exactly search-engine friendly. It defaults to creating horrible URLs, its default page title system has issues, and it creates duplicate content in several ways. (Great CMS, no?)

 

Turning Down the Crap-Factor on Joomla URLs

The default URLs can be improved slightly by turning on "Search Engine Friendly URLs" in the site's Global Configuration menu. They'll go from looking like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2380/Itemid,35/

to this:

http://www.yoursite.com/content/view/30/55

Better, but still not great, as they're completely lacking in keywords.

The best solution is to simply download and install a plug-in. There are several that get the job done, but the one I use is sh404SEF.

An example of a URL from my site with the above plug-in installed:

http://www.businesstaxbooks.com/index.php/Sole-Proprietor-Tax-Guide/Self-Employment-Tax-Explained.html

Looks better to me. [Note: Here's a chance for somebody who actually knows their stuff to show me up and explain how to get the"/index.php" out of there.]

 

Solving Duplicate Content Issues with Joomla

The above URL plug-in will fix a great deal of the problems that Joomla creates by pointing so many URLs at the same piece of content. Another important step to take [at the risk of stating the overly-obvious] is to be sure to turn off the "email icon," "print icon," and "pdf icon" in the Global Configuration menu.

 

Improving Joomla Page Titles

By default, Joomla page titles follow this structure: "SiteName – PageName"

There's been some discussion recently about whether or not to include the site name in the page title. Regardless, I think we can at least agree that it's a good thing to have control over whether or not to include the site title. (And further, to have control over whether it comes before or after the page's title.)

For instance, my site's name (Business Tax Books) is rather long. As such, my longer titles were getting cut off due to character limits. For example, my C-Corp vs S-Corp vs LLC page only had approximately half of its title showing in the SERPS. (And it was the relevant keywords getting cut off, because they came after the site name.)

A quick change in the joomla.php file (located at /includes/joomla.php) will fix this.

Change this:

$this->_head['title'] = $title ? $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'] . ' – '. $title : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];

To this:

$this->_head['title'] = $title && $title != "Home" ? $title : $GLOBALS['mosConfig_sitename'];

I take no credit for the above fix. I found it on the Joomla forums. After I made the change, I noticed a substantial increase in search traffic to the page I mentioned above, as well as a few others with long titles. (And that's without even doing anything to rank better!)

WordPress Plugins

1. Add to Any adds links to a large number of social bookmarking sites to your posts.
2. GeneralStats is a statistics components that counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages. Useful for doing keyword research.
3. Google Sitemap Generator creates an XML sitemap of your website. In the current version homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported. Priority is automatically assigned based on the number of comments.
4. Gregarious is a social bookmarking plugin for Digg, Reddit and Feedburner with update checks via AJAX.
5. Popularity Contest is a counter for posts, categories, archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. to determine the most popular pages of your site.
6. Technorati Tagging Plugin adds Techorati tags to your posts and enables you to display a tag cloud.
7. WP-Cache is a page caching system to improve your websites performance. Cached pages are stored as static files, reducing server load thus making your site faster and more responsive.
8. X-Valid attempts to convert posts and comments to valid XHTML. Read more on the benefits of Web Standards Compliance.
9.  

drupal, joomla, wordpress