SEARCH ENGINE FOCUS

You may have a wonderful Content Management System (CMS), and a beautifully designed, usable website, but do people know it is there?

790 million search engine searches are carried out in the USA every week (ComScore Networks). In the uk 15.5 million people visited search engines in April 2003 (Neilson / Net Ratings).

For many people search engines represent the doorway onto the internet, the first port of call when they are looking for something, researching a product, service, service provider, or undertaking research.  It is also well documented that people who are actively searching the internet have a predisposition to buy.  If you are selling a product, and it appears at the top of the listings when people search for it, they are more likely to buy from you than a competitor.

What is it that you do when you are looking for information? Jump onto Google?

Today many companies are investing in search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO) programmes to help people to find their websites and website content.  What they may not realise is that the CMS they have invested in may be working against them. 

Is your CMS working against your search engine rankings?

Some CMS's are very limiting for the search engines.  The way they are engineered stops the search engines from automatically entering and indexing your site(s) properly.  They actually prevent people from finding your site on the internet. 

In this article we explore how the search engines work, what the limitations of some CMS's can be and how WORKSsitebuilder has been engineered, from the ground up, with optimising and increasing your ranking in the search engines in mind.

How does WORKSsitebuilder increase my search engine rankings?

There are a number of factors that are at play with search engine rankings.  The way the search engines index and rank sites, the way your CMS presents content on your website, how the webpages are constructed by your CMS, and how the published website is navigated. We will explore all of these in turn.

How do the Search engines work?

Search engines can simply be divided into two types, human powered 'directories', such as Yahoo!, and 'crawler' based search engines.  To obtain a listing in one of the directories requires a manual submission of a site description to the engine, which is then reviewed by a human, and indexed appropriately. We will focus here on crawler type engines, whose results are very much influenced by the management of your content and construction of your CMS.

Crawlers, such as Google, Lycos, Inktomi and Altavista send out automated 'spiders' that automatically 'crawl' the web, reading web pages and indexing content as they go. Search engine results are 'ranked' in a number of ways influenced by a number of factors; page titles, page content, content 'context', access to content, internal and external weblinks and other factors such as site traffic.

To achieve high rankings a site needs to pander to the different crawler 'algorithms' that influence rankings, and the undelying crawler search methodology.

How can a CMS undermine my rankings?

On a purely technical level many CMS's generate 'dynamic' pages and page links (URL's), that is pages and page links are generated 'on the fly' from a database (as opposed to being a 'static' HTML page) that are created once, and uploaded to the web.  Search engine spiders find dynamic pages and page links problematic.

CMS'a often create dynamic content and dynamic URL's, usually identified by special characters, #!? or %, in the URL string ie www.mywebsite.com/myservices.asp?service=1&product2. Many search engine spiders do not index dynamic links.  Search engines like static content at a static URL, so they can rest assured that the visitors they direct to your website will see the same content that they indexed.  They will update your content, if it has changed, when they re-spider in a few months time.

Dynamic URL’s are also not spidered as it has been a common way for webmasters to make sites look bigger to the search engines, multiple dynamic URL’s pointing at the same page. Similarly if a pages URL is changed, when a news page is moved from current to archive, for example, search engines will not re-index pages.

Some spiders, such as Google, will happily index dynamic pages, but it should be considered that Google rankings are influenced by how many other sites link to you (a gauge of importance) so good rankings in other search engines are important.  Furthermore many CMS’s use JavaScript to build dynamic site navigations (so the navigation updates as pages are added) many search engines do not read JavaScript, and will not follow links to the pages therein.

Finally CMS’s often give scant regard to the creation of site ‘Meta description’, the description applied in the underlying page code that describes the content of the page for search purposes. For example a CMS should allow the generation of ‘Meta tags’ on a page by page basis to allow the author to create ‘hooks’ for the search engines. The engines will then look at the Meta tags, and the page content and rank content based on the relevance of the text within the page (and how it relates to other pages linked within and outside your site).  In summary the makeup of your CMS will significantly affect the ability of people to find your site and its content, products and services.

How does WORKSsitebuilder help?

Not only does WORKSsitebuilder overcome all of these problems, but this web content management system offers significant enhancements to bolster your search engine positioning.

Firstly WORKSsitebuilder creates static URL’s, which remain constant, even when pages are archived.

More importantly the WORKSsitebuilder ‘Theme Engine’ creates static links between the pages and articles within your site automatically.  In so doing a search engine will visit a page, and be directed via a static URL to another, relevant, page within your site.  This creates relevance, as the pages are linked by theme, keyword and type of content.  In so doing you also indicate to the search engine that you are happy to link to other pages within your site, so why should they not?  The theme engine fomalises the structure, presentation and labeling of WORKSsitebuilder site content giving users and search engines relevant and inter-linked site content to explore.

WORKSsitebuilder also associates keywords to all content.  These keywords are stored within the page ‘Meta data’ and serve as an editorial guideline to content writers.  If content writers abide by the editorial guidelines and refer to these keywords within the page content then the page becomes relevant to search engines.

The full integrated statistics and website user metrics reporting within WORKSsitebuilder also allows website administrators to track Keywords used to find your site within multiple search engines.  Statistics are also available for search engine spider activity within your site.  This allows website administrators to be proactive in ‘tuning’ site content and structure to the needs of the search engines.

Finally WORKSsitebuilder menus, although dynamic, are constructed using HTML, allowing search engines the opportunity to follow primary and secondary navigations to website content.  Furthermore, the inclusion of a full site-map allows search engines a single page from which they can explore the whole site.

The proof of the pudding….

Click here to search for 'routes to market' on Google
(LooK for The-RTMA)

Click here to search for 'Planning Officers' on Google
(Look for the Planning Officers Society)

Search engine marketing is more than ever a crucial part of a companies marketing mix. Be it by paid-inclusion (keyword sponsorship) or search engine optimisation. With WORKSsitebuilder you can rest assured that the the exposure of your site content, your products and your services to the search engines is of key importance.

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For further information or to arrange a full demonstration, please contact Angus Phillipson on +44 (0) 870 873 1600.

Founded in 1998, eShopworks is one of the UK's leading developers of web content management and ecommerce systems providing website solutions to SMEs, corporate clients and local government.