search marketing blog: ambergreen

Exponent is a modular Content Management System (CMS) with some useful built-in modules including Weblog, News, Calendar and Search module. It offers a completely new way of managing website content without using a typical back-end/front-end approach.Exponent CMS is an open source version of Exponent Pro, a paid version of the system which offers lots of additional features. OICGroup claims to have created a CMS that enables a creation of search engine friendly websites for small and medium size businesses.

In this article we look at the search engine friendliness and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) features of Exponent open source version.

t is a simple and user friendly system. The two step installation process took less than 5 minutes and no additional changes in the server configuration were necessary. This is quite impressive, as in case of other open source packages, such as PHP-Nuke or Drupal, the installation process usually requires access to the server configuration files.

After only 45 minutes with the Exponent CMS I was able to learn the interface and answer some standard questions.

Can every page have a unique set of meta tags (title, description, keywords)?
Yes, however, all meta data has to be typed in manually, i.e. a user has to fill title, meta description and meta keywords field every time a new article or section is created.

It would be great if some of the metadata was generated dynamically or a user could define static metadata elements, such as brand name or some generic keywords that should be included in all pages.

Can URL’s be written in a format that is easily spidered and algorithmically compliant?
Yes, however, Exponent does not allow the adding of keywords. An example of a URL

www.yourdomain.com/index.php?section=11

Exponent doesn’t support search engine friendly URLs, which is a standard feature of almost every SEO friendly CMS. URL rewriting is in the roadmap for the 0.96.7 version.

Can pages sit out with the CMS with custom URL’s?
Yes, there are no restrictions here.

Can they use a robots.txt file to block unwanted and duplicated pages from being spidered?
Yes, although there is no robots.txt validation.

Does the CMS allow you to use custom image file names and ALT tags?
Yes. It is also possible to change the location of images and images are saved with the original filename. However, it is not possible to change the filename from the image manager panel. Although the way images are managed seems to be straightforward, I don’t really like the image upload form, where you can specify image Name and Description but you cannot define Alt tag. Inserting images into content is not very user-friendly either as instead of a drop down menu or thumbnails, the image location has to be specified manually.

Can the CMS generate a Google site map (xml)?
No.

Can the CMS generate a traditional site map and update it every time the structures changes?
No.

Does the CMS allow you to create a custom 404 page?
No.

Does the CMS support creation of RSS?
No.

Conclusion
One of the great things about Exponent is the interface, which is based on containers. Those who require a standard CMS interface would better choosing another system. In Exponent it is possible to build new pages by clicking one of the icons in and adding a new module, - the Text Module in this case. There are however some consequences of this approach; for example a page might look quite complicated with a lot of modules and tables. I also think that for bigger sites, a back-end with a categorised content table is required to manage content effectively.

Time consuming content management for a larger site and lack of a large community behind the Exponent CMS limits the use of the system to small websites. In terms of search engine optimisation and search engine friendliness there is also a big gap between Exponent and other open source systems. The lack of search engine friendly URLs support, no dynamic metadata generation and no sitemaps support only confirms that creating a SEO friendly site is not possible with basic Exponent installation.

I would only recommend this CMS for a website with less than 50 pages of content, which doesn’t get updated very often. It might be the ideal solution for people with less technical knowledge, who want to create a simple site and are not very concerned about search engine optimisation techniques.

Although, the lack of some SEO modules, it is still possible to get search engine traffic to an Exponent built site. The golden rules of SEO, in terms of creating unique content and metadata, are still valid and can be utilised with Exponent.

For the next while Luke will be providing us with a CMS review once a month, there’s some really good info here so be sure to have a look and if you have any questions, or want to see a certain CMS reviewed, ask Luke, don’t ask me!

 p

…………………………………………………………………………………………………

Joomla! is an open source Content Management Systems (CMS), and it is fair to say one of the most popular open source web applications ever created, recently winning the Best Linux / Open Source Project at UK Linux and Open Source Awards 2006.

Joomla! is a product from Open Source Matters (OSM), the same team that developed Mambo CMS and can be used to build a simple website or even be used as a framework to create more complex corporate applications.

Lets take a look if we can use Joomla! to build a search engine friendly website.

As a default Joomla! does not offer much of a flexibility in terms of optimisation process, however you can change the configuration to use flat URLs such as http://www.example.com/joomla/content/category/3/7/25/. Unfortunately Joomla! does not allow you to change keywords in URLs, which is what we really need in order to maximize the SEO impact.

This is where SEO components come into place; in Joomla! speak components are additional modules that can be easily added to the system without touching the source code. The Joomla SEO website offers a download of a number of SEO tools that can be fairly easy uploaded to the system core.

We will start from OpenSEF, a Joomla! component that adds support for search engine friendly URLs.

Questions

Standard version – Addons Notes

Can every page have a unique set of meta tags (title, description, keywords)?
Yes

Joomla! automatically pulls in the Site name and adds the Content item title, for example if the site name is “The home of Joomla!” and an article name is “Article 1″, then the title would become: “The home of Joomla! - Article 1″.

It’s recommended to have the site name (usually brand name) at the end of the title, this would require to look into the code and change the way title information is pulled in. As for meta data (description and keywords) these are handcreated. OpenSEF package includes Metatag Generator.

Can URL’s be written in a format that is easily spidered and algorithmically compliant?
Yes, but it does not allow the adding of keywords.

You need to install OpenSEF component and uncomment a bit of a code in the .htaccess file, however the way URLs are controlled is not that great as we need to type in a new version of every URL, ie it would be quite a task to change the URLs of more than 10-20 pages.

Can pages sit outwith the CMS with custom URL’s?
Yes, there are no restrictions here.

Can they use a robots.txt file to block unwanted and duplicated pages from being spidered?
Yes, there is no robots.txt validation however.

Does the CMS allow you to use custom image file names and ALT tags?
Yes. All files are saved in images folder, and there is full control on the structure of all subfolders. Images are saved with the original filename, but it is not possible to change the filename from the administrator panel.

Can the CMS generate a Google site map (xml)?
No / Yes. You need to install OpenSEF or new version of Joomap.

Can the CMS generate a traditional site map and update it every time the structures changes?
No / Yes. You need to install Joomap (shows the normal Menu Structure, Content Categories, Sections and Virtuemart Categories in a hierarchical list.)

Does the CMS allow you to create a custom 404 page?
No / Yes. Use OpenSEF, this allows to set a URL validation level and specify a link to your 404 page.

Does the CMS support creation of RSS?
Yes

Conclusion

Jooomla! is a powerful framework and with OpenSEF it also allows you to develop a site the way search engines love. OpenSEF is not the only component that allows to add SEO features, there are many more including the Google Analytic and keyword density components.

It all sounds great, but you might find some components or modules that don’t seem to work. In most of these cases you will find the answer to your questions in forums or groups, but please bare in mind that some basic technical knowledge (PHP, MySQL, HTML,CSS) would be very handy in order to implement any changes.