This work investigates the influence of several modal geometric imperfections on the nonlinear vibration of simply-supported transversally excited cylindrical shells. The Donnell nonlinear shallow shell theory is used to study the nonlinear vibrations of the shell. A general expression for the transversal displacement is obtained by a perturbation procedure which identifies all modes that couple with the linear modes through the quadratic and cubic nonlinearities. The imperfection shape is described by the same modal expansion. So, a particular solution is selected which ensures the convergence of the response up to very large deflections. Substituting the obtained modal expansions into the equations of motions and applying the standard Galerkin method, a discrete system in time domain is obtained. Several numerical strategies are used to study the nonlinear behavior of the imperfect shell. Special attention is given to the influence of the form of the initial geometric imperfections on the natural frequencies, frequency-amplitude relation, resonance curves and bifurcations of simply-supported transversally excited cylindrical shells.