Search Engine Optimisation

Achieving good search engine rankings for your site relies most heavily on having good content, marketing and link building activity to bring in visitors, however there are a number of features of our CMS that will also help with this process.

XML Sitemap

The CMS is set up by default to generate a sitemap.xml file, which helps the major search engines like Google crawl the pages on your site and add them to their indices so they can appear in search results.

The sitemap is dynamically generated each time the site is re-published, so that it always remains up to date. You can also manually set the Change Frequency and Priority values for each page.  Or you can switched off the sitemap if desired.

As an additional service – particularly when your site is first published, we can submit the Sitemap to Google for you – which can help speed up the initial indexing of the site.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

The default file names of your published pages are: page_nn.html – where ‘nn’ is a unique page number.

This is very good for quickly creating pages, and making sure that they are unique, but they are not descriptive. So we also enable you to create your own file names, which can use descriptive keyword phrases that make more sense to visitors, and are more search engine friendly.

Meta Tag Editing

Meta tags contain information about your pages that does not appear on screen to a site visitor, but is used by search engines for indexing and displaying in search results.

The three important tags: Title, Description and Keywords, are all editable in the admin area for your pages. This means you are free to manipulate them quickly and easily as part of your SEO efforts.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google that collects information about things like which pages on your site are visited the most, how many visitors you get every day, and where those visitors have come from. It also tells you what browsers and operating systems people are using when they visit your site, plus much more.

Analytics is a very powerful information tool that can help you learn more about what people value about your site – which is the first step in the process of continuous improvement.

We can set up very simple Google Analytics tracking on your site, and can also provide some guidance on interpreting the information for you.

For business critical sites - such as online stores, we also recommend using some of the advanced features of Google Analytics to enable you to get a clearer understanding of your return on investment in the site. 

For example, by tracking drop out rates at key points in the purchase process you can make informed decisions about improvements to site design to help increase you visitor conversion rates.