Cut recurring developer tickets with CMS SEO essentials like canonical tags and indexing controls, plus automation, redirect safeguards, and real examples.

Content management systems (CMS) often try to force SEOs into a box of “this is how a website should work.” The problem is that SEO has never been a black-and-white thing and so often depends upon the individual website, industry, and brand as to how we may want to structure indexing, content, and infrastructure.

Over my years as an in-house SEO, consultant, and web developer, I’ve worked with a wide range of CMS. Even though we continue to see improvements across platforms, many still fail to meet the base-level requirements and flexibility we as SEOs need day-to-day. This results in us as an industry being on repeat, submitting the same ticket for a fix again and again.

What do I consider to be the actual bare minimum a CMS should offer for SEOs and content creators? Every week I continue to find out about often well-known platforms missing what I would consider a baseline standard.

On three different systems this year, I’ve watched teams need a developer to implement canonical tags – Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo announced the tag together back in 2009! You’d think we’d have this sorted by now.

On Webflow, I’ve had to hardcode HTML tables into the page because the editor doesn’t have built-in HTML table support. I’ve found having semantically correct HTML incredibly important to help bots understand the content.

txt out-of-the-box, exclude pages from the sitemap, or noindex individual pages without the help of a developer or accessing your source files.

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