Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation Using the Net Starter CMS

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and content management systems (CMS) are the two fastest growing and most talked about areas of web development at the moment. Net Starter’s knowledge in both areas culminated in a solution that not only empowers you, the client, to manage your website’s content but also allows you to optimise your site to get good rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPS). How? We’re going to get onto that shortly. Although website optimisation is a complete industry in it’s own, with the best in the business benefiting from years of experience and study, there are a few key points that can make the difference between coming up in the first couple of pages and getting lost in the sea of the thousands of resulting pages. This article only touches the surface of this dark art known as SEO so if you are serious about getting excellent results give our consultants a call for a no-obligation chat about your site and it’s potential on 1300 668 399

Now to the crux of this article – how to get those search engine results (particularly Google).

1. Link Popularity. Probably the most enduring task is getting people to link to your website. It is also perhaps the most important task to getting good rankings. Having another website link to yours is seen by the search engines as a vote for your site. A site that has more votes for their site is regarded as more important and thus may appear higher in the rankings against sites with less links. However, it must be stated that not all links are weighted equally. There are three main criteria that search engines (especially Google) use to value a link to your website.
   1. PR of the site linking to you. PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. Google gives each site a ranking between 0 and 10. The higher the PR of the site linking to you, the better. You can see a website’s Page rank by downloading the Google toolbar (see below).
      
   2. Relevance of the site. Google also looks at the content relevance of the site linking to you. A site that has content of a similar nature is valued higher than a site that has no relevance to yours whatsoever.
   3. Government and Organisations. A website that ends in .gov, .org, or .edu are valued more highly than say a .com or a .net. This is because these extensions are used by government, organisation and education websites respectively. Websites like these are seen as more of an authority and qualified link, so try to get some if you can.
2. Keywords optimisation. Having all the links in the world isn’t going to help your potential customers find you if your content isn’t well written including the key words people are going to use when searching for your services. To give yourself the best chance of coming up top, you need to work out the keywords for your business and utilize them in the page title, page keywords and page content.

   A good position doesn't depend only on your choice of keywords. It also depends on how well you position those keywords in your web page, and how many quality external pages link to you. However, choosing the wrong keywords can throw off your entire search engine optimization strategy, so you need to invest a few hours and make sure you do it right.

   Let's start with your homepage. Look at it carefully and write down the words and phrases that best define your site. Try to form two or three word phrases, since competition for one-word key phrases is fierce, and it is virtually impossible to get a top position for them. That is why, from now on, we will talk about key phrases, not keywords.

   Once you have developed your list of potential key phrases you are ready for the next step: to analyze the demand and supply for those key phrases, and choose the best ones (those with good demand and not enough supply).

   We will first check the demand for your selected key phrases. For this, we will go to Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool:

   http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

   Overture is a popular pay-per-click search engine (as we know, pay-per-click search engines are the only ones that disclose keyword popularity for free). You will then type each of the keyphrases you selected, and see how many people search for those terms. This tool will show you only those searches conducted in Overture (and only in one month time). However, the relative popularity of each search term will be very similar in other search engines as well.

   Using Net Starter’s CMS, this is a task that no longer requires the use of a web developer, or trying to trawl your way through the html to make the changes. As an example, a fictitious Australian home electronics ecommerce website “OzCinema” is used below.

After using the search term suggestion tool, the 3 main keywords selected for the homepage are as follows:

Ecommerce electronics website;

Using the Net Starter CMS, the following information can be easily added by the website administrator without any knowledge of HTML.

The Net Starter CMS makes it simple for anyone to maintain and update the search engine information and website content on their website, making sure the content is fresh and always up to date. If you have an existing website, or don’t have one yet, call one of our friendly sales consultants for a no obligation chat on 1300 668 399.