Over the last year there is increasing evidence that many CMS systems and shopping carts are being sold as ?search engine friendly?, indeed at the Internet World show at Excel this year it was one of the main selling points being hawked about. Of course the promotional literature was avidly gathered in readiness for our research and investigation. Once back at the office we carefully checked out the advertised systems and then looked for ?live sites? using these systems. Closer inspection of all the sites we looked at showed they were only marginally search engine friendly and most would offer no potential for any generic competitive listings in popular search engines.

This really poses a number problems, it is evident that the majority of these development companies are clearly jumping on the ?get listed in Google? bandwagon that is clearly rolling at the moment. Fair due must be given to their marketing people who have clearly seen an opportunity to increase sales but in their panic they are missing the real potential and offering short term gains but long term failure.

You see the best thing about this industry is that it is transparent, your website and its pages are either listed or they are not, the people who purchase this software will realise sooner or later that it has not done the job and the result is failure. Much of this failure will be pinned on the unfortunate SEO companies who are haplessly trying to get these websites listed and not fully understanding the scale of the task that presents itself. The end result will be the panic introduction of many so called ?content and themed? pages, some of this will work in the short term but it is not what this is really about.

The real picture is that the unfortunate people who are conned by false promise are like lambs to the slaughter, these buyers do not know enough about SEO to realise what they are buying is not going to do the job on the search engine friendliness front but they are desperate to get listed. The floundering SEO companies will get the blame because too few of them really understand just what it takes for a website to be competitive in the long term and especially where the market is at all competitive and will not realise that what they are working with prevents the software from delivering.

In this industry there is a wheel that turns slowly, once it starts turning then sooner or later it will have completed its full revolution and when this happens many of those people who have been let down will come back into the market, they will be rather cynical and a bit wiser but still looking for the solution that will deliver.

The industry providers of these poor performing systems will lament the passing of the real opportunity, the opportunity to truly develop a world beating CMS that really is search engine friendly from all aspects. The current market is crying out for this, those systems that are currently being branded as SEO friendly will ultimately fail to produce and the clients who purchased these systems will lose confidence, money and of course some will lose their businesses.

There is only one guarantee in natural search and its relationship with most CMS and shopping carts, it is not that they will deliver top search positions, it is that they will fail in natural search because they do not carry the functionality or the correct structure and none of them seem to be talking to the right SEO experts to deliver an off the shelf system that has the potential do deliver if it is harnesses correctly both on page and off page.