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Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing for Search Engines

To optimize your site for searching by Google and other search engines ("SEs"), we recommend you follow these simple rules-of-thumb:

  1. Choose an appropriate TITLE for your page. Make it rich with your preferred keywords, and avoid platitudes like, "Welcome to our web site".
  2. Using Content Settings, fill your META Description field with appropriate wording, and fill the META Keyword field with approprate keywords, including alternate terminology for your subject matter (including mis-spellings).You can access Content Settings using the star icon on the Admin Toolbar  .
  3. Use an "alias" for each page. Currently, only HTML items can have aliases. Aliases are used in the URL of the page, and should mimic the title. This gives your page a URL of the form http://www.yoursite.com/important_keywords.html. Notice that we can use a static page reference (alias.html) rather than the CMS default (?cID=alias). This is because we use mod_rewrite - see below. Aliases are defined in Content Settings.
  4. In the content of all HTML pages, ensure that the important words from the TITLE are repeated several times. This helps to pursuade search engines that your page is truly about what it pretends to be!
  5. Use a Site Map. This is standard feature of most Tribiq CMS templates; if you don't have a sitemap template, create one following the Template Cookbook.
  6. If several key phrases are important to you, then consider setting up one web page per phrase. For example, if you sell extranets - by itself a rather broad category - and an important market for you is solicitors, consider setting up a page purely dedicated to "solicitors extranets", with everything optimized for this search term.

mod_rewrite

If you are running an Apache HTTP Server you may want to use the mod_rewrite module. This allows your server to rewrite URLs so that you can use more recognisable hyperlinks in text such as "link.html", rather than "?cID=link".

These hyperlinks are more SE-friendly and of course more human friendly. Most search engines give static URLs (e.g. .html, .htm) a higher ranking. This is especially important when it comes to Google Pagerank and other link analysis applications.

You should read the Configuring mod_rewrite Guide.

Conclusion

The information above is just a simple guide for creating good SE-optimized pages. In addition to the above rules, remember:

  • Your site's visibility is generally improved when several other web sites link to your site, and really they should be sites which carry similar subject matter.
  • Maintaining good site visibility is an ongoing process; you will need to regularly check how well SE's are indexing your site (specifically referring to the key phrases which matter to you). Therefore you may need to keep revisiting your content to maintain good positioning.

 

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