You’ve likely heard it said that on the internet “content is King”, and that is never more true than today. And, it will be true tomorrow as well. So how do content management systems (CMS) fit into the picture? The search engines are all about delivering the newest, most relevant and useful content they can to their users, and if you are the one providing that content, you’ll be the beneficiary of the traffic they can deliver.
In short, a CMS allows users to easily manage the content that is created and streamed into their site, whether it is from the owner or from user generated sources. Videos, RSS feeds, news, images and more can be imported automatically, thus populating your blog/site with an ever-increasing content stream.
This may seem a bit daunting to the novice webmaster, but in fact, that’s who these systems are aimed at serving; those who don’t have the technical capabilities to manage an ever-increasing array of content from many sources. Content management systems are designed to be extremely user-friendly, and with a few clicks and a bit of automation, you can have a great deal of the work set up in advance.
You can set your CMS up to post on a schedule, allowing you to effectively not be at the mercy of your site every day, while still publishing a wealth of terrific content, tailor-made for your pages on a regular basis. The CMS can also help you direct more traffic to your site, by automatically bookmarking your posts and articles, videos and more to the major bookmarking sites. There are also plugins now that automate the execution of a sound internal linking strategy, allowing your site to rank higher in the search engines.
There are many CMS software platforms out there, and a great many of them are free. Some are easier to install and use than others, and your web hosting company may have a lot of these available for you to use.
Some of the more popular free content management systems include names like Wordpress, (thought it was just a blog?) Drupal, Joomla, Pligg (good for your own social network), Cushy CMS, Spip, concrete5 and others. Wordpress would win hands down in a popularity contest, and for many good reasons. It is very easy to use and expand, and is not that hard for non-techies to implement.
Content management systems run on several different server side languages, with most of the more popular ones using PHP, and still others utilizing ASP, Perl, Java and others.
If you are in need of a site that offers more than a place to host your email, you may well want to look into what a good CMS can do for you. With all the variety and capabilities out there in CMS, you won’t be disappointed!
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