There isn't a day that goes by, when I don't have to make use of a content management system of some sort. I come across them in my working life,as a number of campaigns that I work on have some sort of system to make changes on a website, but I also come across them in my personal life, as although it is not billed as one, the interface where changes are made to ones myspace profile is also another type of content management system.

Some content management systems are great and contain all the functionality that is required, whilst others certainly weren't designed with making changes from an SEO view in mind.

The bad ones usually don't allow any of the meta data to be changed on any pages, will very rarely allow the content to be switched to an HTML view, which normally allows things like <h1> tags or adding the tracking code we use to record keywords used to find the site by various search engines.

I saw a really good one yesterday, which seemed to allow all the components I always look for to be edited. It allowed for the standard title and meta changes, but also had an additional field that allowed any extraneous meta tags that were not in the system ready to be added when required.

It also seemed to keep the site within a good tidy structure, with the targetted keywords used throughout the directory structure. When it came to modifying the pages, there was a standard edit as it looks component, but you could also switch it into HTML mode, and modify the code directly.

Finally, the last item that I particularly liked was that when the changes were completed, the file was loaded to a development server before being made live!

This would be a great advantage, as one of the pitfalls of CMS systems is that the work is normally being done on the live site, which gives no margin for error.

I realise what I would like to see in a CMS is very different than what a webmaster running a site requires for the day to day operations. However, if all CMS systems had this functionality, I am sure that there would be some additional competition for many more keywords out there on the search engine results pages.