The internet business industry has such a high ability of sniffing the slightest waffle of opportunity. Yet surprisingly since 1995 debut of Content Management Systems (CMS), they are just making a splash recently. This is despite the huge advantages they offer in managing website based businesses. One may wonder, why the paradox.

Internet businesses like any other business are driven by the ability to be effective. You need to reach your market and provide value while making profit. The reason behind the previous unpopularity of CMSs had been that it was significantly mitigating this process. This was particularly so for web businesses that depended on Search Engine (SE) traffic. In one hand it gave a powerful back end solution. In the other hand it took away the ability to compete in the SE driven market.

For the longest time, CMSs have not been SE friendly. This means, if you were to use a CMS and your competitor used the plain old HTML pages, they would out-rank you in SEs every time. Consequently they would drive more traffic to their sites and possibly make more conversions. This problem was primarily because most available CMSs used databases that create dynamic pages as opposed to static pages.

Dynamic pages pose two kinds of problems. First, dynamic pages are not viewed by SEs because they exist in a database and not on the page (or URL). They only come to the page after you query (request from) the database. This translates to mean that Google, Yahoo and MSN have nothing to index and rank in their Search Engine Results Page (SERP). For a SE to rank your page, it first visits your site and caches the page. Caching means taking an exact copy of your page and stores it in their database. It is this cached copy that is used to determine you ranking. If SEs cannot cache your website you literally are non-existent as far as SERP are concerned.

The second problem of dynamic pages is the URL that it uses for the pages it calls up from the database. You can use a pages URL to differentiate a static page from a dynamic page. URL or User Resource Location is that string on the browser that starts as "HTTP". Static pages contain only alpa-numerics, dashes, underscores and forward slashes. Dynamic pages notably also include attributes that SE crawlers avoid. These are the And sign (&), the sequential two letters "id", and the Equal sign (=). These attributes are used to command the query in the database. When the SE crawlers follow such links, they end up being trapped in an endless loop. Consequently they just avoid them.

Recently though, the SEs are getting better at indexing dynamic pages. But no one really seems know to what extent they can do it. But more importantly, internet business optimized CMSs that create static pages are increasingly becoming available. So when getting a CMS for your web business, inquire to know if it creates static pages. Dynamic page will most likely start you off on the wrong foot; of course unless you know what you are doing.