Why it's important to use a good CMS instead of a free website builder for your SEO.

Why it's important to use a good CMS instead of a free website builder for your SEO.


Thursday, April 26, 2018

In the last couple of years, some tools (including one that's very well known) have allowed companies to 'easily and quickly build their website' using their system. Although at first glance some might say that's great! If you look a little closer, you'll see that the saying 'You get what you pay for' also applies to these systems.

Complete lack of content for search engines

One of the major problems with these websites is the way the website is generated. Let's take a look, for example, at one of the most popular free tools in the world. Although the website, at first glance, seems great, if a Web developer takes a closer look, he'll notice this: 

As you can see, there's hardly anything between the 2 <body> tags. If you have any doubt, you can see it for yourself. Just right-click on your webpage and select 'View source code'. Everything is generated in javascript that uses their proprietary system (which you don't really have access to) and it's that javascript who tells the browser what to display and how to display it. The major problem with that is that search engines don't parse javascript, therefore, they don't see any content whatsoever. You heard me well, all the time, money and energy spent to create great content for your website (and sometimes even paying professionals to do it for you) is completely wasted because search engines aren't even able to see that content.

Ouch!

They offer an SEO tool that's completely useless

To add insult to injury, this same world-reknown company offers an SEO module that allows companies to enter titles and descriptions for each page, which should technically help their positioning in Google. Although they really generate the code needed for setting up the title and description in search engines, it gives its customers a false sense of security that their website will be indexed because they took the time to create great titles for each and every one of their pages. Because no matter how much effort that company puts in, his website probably won't be listed. 

One of the main rules to follow to have great positioning in Google is to have great content and to make sure everything fits together (content, title, description, structure, external links, etc.). If a search engine sees a webpage with a title and description, but doesn't see any content on that page, it won't add it to its index. The main objective for search engines is to send the best links possible to its users, and they don't consider that a website without any content will be usefull to their users, so he will just skip it and display other links instead. That's why you never see any websites developped with these kinds of tools in search results.