SEO for custom CMS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Rajeshwar Reddy: My entertainment company(like IMDB for India) will be creating a custom CMS to upload our content. What should I watch out for?
  And I am tasked to provide guidelines to devs in terms of SEO ; best practices. I would really welcome your suggestions. Please share ; your exp of developing custom CMS ; if any one has already gone through ; this.
• 
  Richard Hearne: Best thing you can do is hire a pro early on. If you can't hire one you should probably stick to an off-the-shelf cms. You're going down a very deep rabbit hole right now.
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  Toni Anicic: The question is too broad, it's almost as if you asked us to teach you SEO.
• 
  Rajeshwar Reddy:  ;Thanks Richard, We did outsource the work to pros. Anything from SEO point of view can be suggested early on so that they can integrate those features.
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  Richard Hearne: If they are pros they should be telling you.
  
  From experience I can tell you that building a cms is nothing trivial. If you're serious about becoming an imdb for India, and you're relying on organic traffic in any way, you should hire an SEO pro to advise you from start. Just my $0.02.
• 
  Dave Elliott: My best bit of advice is DON'T BUILD A CUSTOM CMS.
  Nothing but trouble has ever come out of a custom CMS, they always have ridiculous quirks, you won't get the support you need and updates to the core cms will never happen and it will be a bugger to sort out when you decide you need to add new features or modules etc.
  
  There are lots of very good off the shelf CMS out there and I will be shocked if you can't find one that has all the features you need. ;
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  Rajeshwar Reddy: Thanks Dave. I will try to talk them out of it.