Unfortunately most businesses only consider SEO after their website is built which can often be a hindrance to your ranking goals. SEO should be a consideration from the first steps of an online journey – most importantly in the construction of your website.

So to help those of you starting out on your online journey, or re-evaluating your web presence, I’ve provided a list of the best SEO friendly “FREE” CMS platforms available for building business websites (rather than just blogging).

1. WordPress

WordPress is what this site is built on. It’s very simple to set up and implement, but also because it has support from such a large developer community.

WordPress is a powerful yet easy to use content management system. While it was originally designed as a blogging platform, it has become a popular choice as a business website CMS.

However, I wish is was easier to modify the type font and make h1 and h2 headers.

2. Drupal

Drupal is a very popular free open source CMS framework written in PHP. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites.

3. Joomla

Joomla is an award-winning free open source CMS. It allows you to build highly interactive websites and online applications. It’s well documented as an easy to use system with a strong collection of extensions to enhance your web presence.

4. Frog CMS

Frog CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management.

5. SilverStripe

SilverStripe CMS contains a powerful PHP5-based programming framework, Sapphire. Sapphire brings immense flexibility and ease in customising your site and provides fundamentals such as security models, workflow, caching, and multiple language and subsite support.

6. Concrete5

Concrete5 is a free open source content management system written in PHP & MySQL. It’s a modern, powerful and extendable framework for building CMS add-ons and complete web applications. concrete5 features a simple-to-understand but very useful model-view-controller architecture, web helpers classes, powerful file handling, complex users and group permissions.

7. Textpattern

Textpattern is an simple content management system that is free, open source software. It has a powerful, sophisticated engine that can be tuned to suit whatever type of web site you can imagine.

Of course, there are plenty of other CMS options available – and choosing the right one will depend on you having a clear idea of your website needs.

Importantly – whichever option you choose, make sure it is a trusted solution, has extensive support and a strong community and ultimately is easy to use. And of course – make sure it gives you the features to ensure you’re on top of your SEO.